The lawsuit alleges OpenAI crawled the web to amass huge amounts of data without people’s permission.
Scraping social media posts and reddit posts doesn’t sound like stealing, they’re public posts.
Here is not just scraping though, it is also using that data to create other content and to potentially also re-publish that data (we have no way of knowing whether chatGPT will spit out any of that nor where did it take what is spitting out).
The expectation that social media data will be read by anybody is fair, but the fact is that the data has been written to be read, not to be resold and published elsewhere too.
It is similar for blog articles. My blog is public and anybody can read it, but that data is not there to be repackaged and sold. The fact that something is public does not mean I can do whatever I want with it.
I could read your blog post and write my own blog post, using yours as inspiration. I could quote your post, add a link back to your blog post and even add affiliate links to my blog post.I could be hired to do something like that for the whole day
ChatGPT doesn’t get inspired, the process is different and it could very well spit verbatim the content. You can do all the rest (depending on the license) without issues, but once again this is not what chatGPT does, as it doesn’t provide attribution.
It’s exactly the same with software, in fact.
I doubt it’s only about some Reddit posts. The scrapping was done on the whole web, capturing everything it could. So besides stealing data and presenting it as its own, it seems to have collected some even more problematic data which wasn’t properly protected.
But that really isn’t OpenAI’s fault. Whoever was in charge of securing the patients data really fucked up.
That’s like saying you didn’t lock your front door so whoever robs you is innocent.
Leaving your front door open isn’t prudent but doesn’t grant permission to others to enter and take/copy your belongings or data.
The security teams may have royally screwed up, but OpenAI has a legal obligation to respect copyright and laws regarding data ownership.
Likewise, they could have scraped pages that included terms of use, copyright, disclaimers, etc., and failed to honor them.
All parties can be in the wrong for different reasons.
It’s certainly their fault that they used it, though.
If they cared, they could have ensured they weren’t using sensitive or otherwise highly problematic information, but they chose not to. That’s on them.
if it was unsecured it’s basically public. whomever put that data on a publicly accessible server is at fault
Just because something is posted online doesn’t mean it can be taken a resold. Copyright law prevents that. Of course, copyright law and generative AI is new and gray area.
