cross-posted from: https://nom.mom/post/121481
OpenAI could be fined up to $150,000 for each piece of infringing content.https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/report-potential-nyt-lawsuit-could-force-openai-to-wipe-chatgpt-and-start-over/#comments
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.
If the Times were to follow through and sue ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, NPR suggested that the lawsuit could become “the most high-profile” legal battle yet over copyright protection since ChatGPT’s explosively popular launch.
This speculation comes a month after Sarah Silverman joined other popular authors suing OpenAI over similar concerns, seeking to protect the copyright of their books.
As of this month, the Times’ TOS prohibits any use of its content for “the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system.”
In the memo, the Times’ chief product officer, Alex Hardiman, and deputy managing editor Sam Dolnick said a top “fear” for the company was “protecting our rights” against generative AI tools.
the memo asked, echoing a question being raised in newsrooms that are beginning to weigh the benefits and risks of generative AI.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good
AI should not be given free reign to train on anything and everything we’ve ever created. Copyright holders should be able to decide if their works are allowed to be used for model training, especially commercial model training. We’re not going to stop a hobbyist, but google/Microsoft/openAI should be paying for materials they’re using and compensating the creators.
No.
- A pen manufacturer should not be able to decide what people can and can’t write with their pens.
- A computer manufacturer should not be able to limit how people use their computers (I know they do - especially on phones and consoles - and seem to want to do this to PCs too now - but they shouldn’t).
- In that exact same vein, writers should not be able to tell people what they can use the books they purchased for.
.
We 100% need to ensure that automation and AI benefits everyone, not a few select companies. But copyright is totally the wrong mechanism for that.
A pen is not a creative work. A creative work is much different than something that’s mass produced.
Nobody is limiting how people can use their pc. This would be regulations targeted at commercial use and monetization.
Writers can already do that. Commercial licensing is a thing.
Nobody is limiting how people can use their pc. This would be regulations targeted at commercial use and monetization.
… Google’s proposed Web Integrity API seems like a move in that direction to me.
But that’s besides the point, I was trying to establish the principle that people who make things shouldn’t be able to impose limitations on how these things are used later on.
A pen is not a creative work. A creative work is much different than something that’s mass produced.
Why should that difference matter, in particular when it comes to the principle I mentioned?
True - but I don’t think the goal here is to establish that AI companies must purchase 1 copy of each book they use. Rather, the point seems to be that they should need separate, special permission for AI training.
You made two arguments for why they shouldn’t be able to train on the work for free and then said that they can with the third?
Did openai pay for the material? If not, then it’s illegal.
Additionally, copywrite and trademarks and patents are about reproduction, not use.
If you bought a pen that was patented, then made a copy of the pen and sold it as yours, that’s illegal. This is the analogy of what openai is going with books.
Plagiarism and reproduction of text is the part that is illegal. If you take the “ai” part out, what openai is doing is blatantly illegal.
Did openai pay for the material? If not, then it’s illegal.
You are reading my comment right now. In my comment, I am letting you know that Sidehill Gougers come in both clockwise and counterclockwise breeds.
Oh no! You just learned that fact for free! I didn’t give you permission to learn from my comments, even though I deliberately published it here for you to read. I demand that you either pay me or wipe that ill-gotten knowledge from your mind.
Don’t you dare tell anyone else about Sidehill Gougers. That’s illegal.
Just now, I tried to get Llama-2 (I’m not using OpenAI’s stuff cause they’re not open) to reproduce the first few paragraphs of Harry Potter and the philosophers’ stone, and it didn’t work at all. It created something vaguely resembling it, but with lots of made-up stuff that doesn’t make much sense. I certainly can’t use it to read the book or pirate it.
All of the examples you listed have nothing to do with how OpenAI was created and set up. It was trained on copyrighted work, how is that remotely comparable to purchasing a pen?
Would a more apt comparison be a band posting royalties to all of their influences?
What’s the basis for this? Why can a human read a thing and base their knowledge on it, but not a machine?
That machine is a commercial product. Quite unlike a human being, in essence, purpose and function. So I do not think the comparison is valid here unless it were perhaps a sentient artificial being, free to act of its own accord. But that is not what we’re talking about here. We must not be carried away by our imaginations, these language models are (often proprietary and for profit) products.
I don’t see how that’s relevant. A company can pay someone to read copyrighted work, learn from it, and then perform a task for the benefit of the company related to the learning.
Because a human understands and transforms the work. The machine runs statistical analysis and regurgitates a mix of what it was given. There’s no understanding or transformation, it’s just what is statistically the 3rd most correct word that comes next. Humans add to the work, LLMs don’t.
Machines do not learn. LLMs do not “know” anything. They make guesses based on their inputs. The reason they appear to be so right is the scale of data they’re trained on.
This is going to become a crazy copyright battle that will likely lead to the entirety of copyright law being rewritten.
I don’t know if I agree with everything you wrote but I think the argument about llms basically transforming the text is important.
Converting written text into numbers doesn’t fundamentally change the text. It’s still the authors original work, just translated into a vector format. Reproduction of that vector format is still reproduction without citation.
It’s also the scale of their context, not just the data. More (good) data and lots of (good) varied data is obviously better, but the perceived cleverness isn’t owed to data alone.
I do hope copyright law gets rewritten. It is dated and hasn’t kept up with society or technology at all.
At some level, isn’t what a human brain does also effectively some form of very very complicated mathematical algorithm, just based not on computer modeling but on the behavior of the physical systems (the neurons in the brain interacting in various ways) involved under the physical laws the universe presents? We don’t yet know everything about how the brain works, but we do at least know that it is a physical object that does something with the information given as inputs (senses). Given that we don’t know for sure how exactly things like understanding and learning work in humans, can we really be absolutely sure what these machines do doesn’t qualify?
To be clear, I’m not really trying to argue that what we have is a true AI or anything, or that what these models do isn’t just some very convoluted statistics, I’ve just had a nagging feeling in the back of my head ever since chatGPT and such started getting popular along the lines of “can we really be sure that this isn’t (a very simple form of) what our brains, or at least a part of it, actually do, and we just can’t see it that way because that’s not how it internally “feels” like?” Or, assuming it is not, if someone made a machine that really did exhibit knowledge and creativity, using the same mechanism as humans or one similar, how would we recognize it, and in what way would it look different from what we have (assuming it’s not a sci-fi style artificial general intelligence that’s essentially just a person, and instead some hypothetical dumb machine that nevertheless possesses genuine creativity or knowledge.) It feels somewhat strange to declare with certainty that a machine that mimics the symptoms of understanding (in the way that they can talk at least somewhat humanlike, and explain subjects in a manner that sometimes appears thought out. It can also be dead wrong of course but then again, so can humans), definitely does not possess anything close to actual understanding, when we don’t even know entirely what understanding physically entails in the first place.
This is going to become a crazy copyright battle that will likely lead to the entirety of copyright law being rewritten.
I think this is very unlikely. All of law is precedent.
Google uses copyrighted works for many things that are “algorithmic” but not AI and people aren’t shitting themselves over it.
Why would AI be different? So long as copyright isn’t infringed at least.
Not trying to argue or troll, but I really don’t get this take, maybe I’m just naive though.
Like yea, fuck Big Data, but…
Humans do this naturally, we consume data, we copy data, sometimes for profit. When a program does it, people freak out?
edit well fuck me for taking 10 minutes to write my comment, seems this was already said and covered as I was typing mine lol
It’s just a natural extension of the concept that entities have some kind of ownership of their creation and thus some say over how it’s used. We already do this for humans and human-based organizations, so why would a program not need to follow the same rules?
Because we don’t already do this. In fact, the raw knowledge contained in a copyrighted work is explicitly not copyrighted and can be done with as people please. Only the specific expression of that knowledge can be copyrighted.
An AI model doesn’t contain the copyrighted works that went into training it. It only contains the concepts that were learned from it.
That doesn’t sit well to me. I agree that, to some extent, artists and writers should be compensated for their work, even if it just means those interested in creating training sets have to buy a copy of each work they intend to use in a training set so long as it can’t be legally acquired for free (similar to how a human has to buy, “”“buy”“” and/or borrow a book if they want to study it).
However, at the same time, this mindset opens the door to actual racism, not the silly “hurr, my skin color’s better than your skin color” bullshit we call racism, but the much nastier, “there are actual differences between you and I which I will use to justify my poor behavior” kinda racism; and when your academic partner has the potential to outclass you in nearly every way (assuming most general AI would decide to work in STEM fields), it’s much easier to justify your bigotry. That bigotry may then be learned by the AI and spit back at you; but this time, the accusations of inferiority may truly be justified.
I mean, think of it this way, what if someone created a general AI that displays all the characteristics of a human to the point of being seemingly indistinguishable from one? Should they not be considered a person? Should they not then be given the same rights as any other person?
Maybe it’s not possible to create a general AI, but maybe we eventually encounter aliens; the universe is a big place after all. Should they not also be given the same rights as a person?
The AI problem is so much larger than I think most people realize. The people making these are trying to create life, even if they don’t realize it. Just because it’s a program or amalgamation of programs that run on silicon and copper doesn’t mean it’s any less alive than an amalgamation of programs running on chemical reactions and electric impulses. It’s just a different kind of alive, like how a car that uses electricity and a car that uses internal combustion are both cars, they just have different ways of doing the same thing. That’s not to say current AI is anywhere near as intelligent as a dog, cat or human, but it has the potential to one day become truly intelligent.
It’s also easy to assume that these are all issues that will be solved in the future, but we have plenty of examples even now of how kicking the can down the street isn’t really an intelligent strategy. Look at how well that can-kicking is turning out in regards to climate change, wealth inequality, healthcare, LGBT+ and BIPOC rights, etc. Regarding AI, I believe there are a lot of hang-ups that we as humans have, whether conscious or unconscious, when it comes to tolerating beings unlike us (we’re still struggling with the skin-color racism); and that it’s better to start working on them now than to wait until Mr. Roboto has his chassis smashed by a bunch of neo-luddites who insist that he’s just a bunch of circuits formed into a crude imitation of humanity.
Edit: you could also make the argument that choosing not to extend personhood to an intelligent machine opens the door to prejudice and bigotry in regards to transhumanism. At some point, we as humans will start modifying ourselves, via either meat or circuitry, and when that happens, there’ll be plenty of people trying to argue that Joe isn’t a human because he’s had his whole brain replaced with a computer. It doesn’t matter if the surgeons replaced his brain step-by-step to insure Joe himself wasn’t lost in the process; they’ll argue that since the brain is what makes Joe, “Joe”, then he must not be human because his brain is no longer organic.
Edit 2: Also, I apologize if I misinterpreted your statement. I’ve seen way too many people saying that AI should never, ever be treated as a person.
I like that argument as it applies to our ai, which isnt ment to reject bad ideas or motiefs but to never have a bad idea in the first place. This setup results in the bot’s path of least resistance being to copy someones homework. Nobody wants the bot to do that.
Someday we may have AI that argument is harder to apply to
i attempt explain, irrelivant
text generators have a “most correct” output that looks and behaves simmlar to pressing the first of the keyboard suggested words repeatedly. We add noise, where the bot is on a dice roll forced to add a random letter to it’s output. Like the above example if you typed a 5 letter word every so often instead.
Open sourcing the models does absolutely nothing. The fact of the matter is that the people who create these models aren’t able to quantifiably show how they work, because those levels have been abstracted so far into code that there’s no way to understand them.
Or a creative who hates to see the entire soul of the human race boiled down to a computer doing a whole lot of math.
AI isn’t going to put office workers out of a job, not just yet, but it’s sure going to end the careers of a whole lot of artists who won’t get entry level opportunities anymore because an AI is able to do 90% of the job and all they need is someone to sort the outputs.
Bullshit. If I learn engineering from a textbook, or a website, and then go on to design a cool new widget that makes millions, the copyright holder of the textbook or website should get zero dollars from me.
It should be no different for an AI.
While I agree, corporations shouldn’t make bucks on knowledge(sorta) they basically eavesdropped and violated the privacy of millions of people for.
AI solutions are made from people’s ideas, and should be freely accessible by the people by definition. It not being sustainable as a business model is also a feature in this case, since there’d be no intrinsic incentive to steal data and violate privacy.
Human experience considers context, experience, and relation to previous works
‘AI’ has the words verbatim in it’s database and will occasionally spit them out verbatim
It doesn’t. The original data is nowhere in its dataset. Words are nowhere in its dataset. It stores how often certain tokens (numbers computationally equivalent to language fragments; not even words, but just a few letters or punctuation, often chunks of words) are found together in sentences written by humans, and uses that to generate human-sounding sentences. The sentences it returns are thereby a massaged average of what it predicts a human would say in that situation.
If you say “It was the best of times,” and it returns “it was the worst of times.”, it’s not because “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” is literally in its dataset, it’s because after converting what you said to tokens, its dataset shows that the latter almost always follows the former. From the AI’s perspective, it’s like you said the token string (03)(153)(3181)(359)(939)(3)(10)(108), and it found that the most common response to that by far is (03)(153)(3181)(359)(61013)(12)(10)(108).
Every time I see this argument it reminds me of how little people understand how copyright works.
- When you buy that book the monetary amount is fair compensation for the contents inside. What you do afterwards is your own business so long as it does not violate the terms within the fine print of the book (no unauthorized reproductions, etc.)
- When someone is contracted for an ad campaign there will be usage rights in the contract detailing the time frame and scope for fair compensation (the creative fee + expenses). If the campaign does well, they can negotiate residuals (if not already included) because the scope now exceeds the initial offer of fair compensation.
- When you watch a movie on TV, the copyright holder(s) of that movie are given fair compensation for the number of times played. From the copyright holders, every artist is paid a royalty. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker still get royalty checks whenever Rush Hour 2 airs or is streamed, as do all the other obscure actors and contributing artists.
- Deviant Art and ArtStation provide free hosting for artists in exchange for a license that lets them distribute images to visitors. The artists have agreed to fair compensation in the form of free hosting and potential promotion should their work start trending, reaching all front page visitors of the site. Similarly, when the artists use the printing services of these sites they provide a license to reproduce and ship their works, as fair compensation the sites receive a portion of the artists’ asking price.
The crux is fair compensation. The rights holder has to agree to the usage, with clear terms and conditions for their creative works, in exchange for a monetary sum (single or reoccurring) and/or a service of similar or equal value with a designated party. That’s why AI continues to be in hot water. Just because you can suck up the data does not mean the data is public domain. Nor does it mean the license used between interested parties transfers to an AI company during collection. If AI companies want to monetize their services, they’re going to have to provide fair compensation for the non-public domain works used.
Yes, but what about you going into teaching engineering, and writing a text book for it that is awfully close to the ones you have used? Current AI is at a stage where it just “remixes” content it gobbled in, and not (yet) advanced enough to actually learn and derive from it.
While that’s understandable, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something where we’re going to have to treat pretty carefully.
If a human wants to become a writer, we tell them to read. If you want to write science fiction, you should both study the craft of writing ranging from plots and storylines to character development to Stephen King’s advice on avoiding adverbs. You also have to read science fiction so you know what has been done, how the genre handles storytelling, what is allowed versus shunned, and how the genre evolved and where it’s going. The point is not to write exactly like Heinlein (god forbid), but to throw Heinlein into the mix with other classic and contemporary authors.
Likewise, if you want to study fine art, you do so by studying other artists. You learn about composition, perspective, and color by studying works of other artists. You study art history, broken down geographically and by period. You study DaVinci’s subtle use of shading and Mondrian’s bold colors and geometry. Art students will sit in museums for hours reproducing paintings or working from photographs.
Generative AI is similar. Being software (and at a fairly early stage at that), it’s both more naive and in some ways more powerful than human artists. Once trained, it can crank out a hundred paintings or short stories per hour, but some of the people will have 14 fingers and the stories might be formulaic and dull. AI art is always better when glanced at on your phone than when looked at in detail on a big screen.
In both the cases of human learners and generative AI, a neural network(-like) structure is being conditioned to associate weights between concepts, whether it’s how to paint a picture or how to create one by using 1000 words.
A friend of mine who was an attorney used to say “bad facts make bad law.” It means that misinterpretation, over-generalization, politicization, and a sense of urgency can make for both bad legislation and bad court decisions. That’s especially true when the legislators and courts aren’t well educated in the subjects they’re asked to judge.
In a sense, it’s a new technology that we don’t fully understand - and by “we” I’m including the researchers. It’s theoretically and in some ways mechanically grounded in old technology that we also don’t understand - biological neural networks and complex adaptive systems.
We wouldn’t object to a journalism student reading articles online to learn how to write like a reporter, and we rightfully feel anger over the situation of someone like Aaron Swartz. As a scientist, I want my papers read by as many people as possible. I’ve paid thousands of dollars per paper to make sure they’re freely available and not stuck behind a paywall. On the other hand, I was paid while writing those papers. I am not paid for the paper, but writing the paper was part of my job.
I realize that is a case of the copyright holder (me) opening up my work to whoever wants a copy. On the other other hand, we would find it strange if an author forbade their work being read by someone who wants to learn from it, even if they want to learn how to write. We live in a time where technology makes things like DRM possible, which attempts to make it difficult or impossible to create a copy of that work. We live in societies that will send people to prison for copying literal bits of information without a license to do so. You can play a game, and you can make a similar game. You can play a thousand games, and make one that blends different elements of all of them. But if you violate IP, you can be sued.
I think that’s what it comes down to. We need to figure out what constitutes intellectual property and what rights go with it. What constitutes cultural property, and what rights do people have to works made available for reading or viewing? It’s easy to say that a company shouldn’t be able to hack open a paywall to get at WSJ content, but does that also go for people posting open access to Medium?
I don’t have the answers, and I do want people treated fairly. I recognize the tremendous potential for abuse of LLMs in generating viral propaganda, and I recognize that in another generation they may start making a real impact on the economy in terms of dislocating people. I’m not against legislation. I don’t expect the industry to regulate itself, because that’s not how the world works. I’d just like for it to be done deliberately and realistically and with the understanding that we’re not going to get it right and will have to keep tuning the laws as the technology and our understanding continue to evolve.
Both an AI and an art student are a complex web of weights that take inputs and returns an output. Agreed.
But the inputs are vastly different. An art student has all the inputs of every moment leading up to the point of putting paint to canvas. Emotion, hunger, pain, and every moment that life has thrown at them. All of them lead to very different results. Every art piece affects the subsequent ones.
The AI on the other hand is purely derivative. It’s only ever told about pre-existing art and a brief interpretation of it. It does not feel emotion. It does not worry about paying its bills or falling in love. It builds a map of weights once and that is that. Every input repeated however many times will yield exactly the same output.
And yes, you have the artists who are professional plagiarists, making hand-painted Picasso imitations of someone’s chihuahua for $20 over the internet. But they’re not mass producing derivative work by the thousands.
I fully agree with the shit-in, shit-out sentiment, and researchers should be free to train their models of whatever data they need.
But monetising their models, that by definition are generating derivative works is another matter.
How do you know it is purely derivative? Are you saying an AI can’t write a sentence that has never been written before or are you saying that it can’t have an original thought? If it is writing a brand new sentence that is an amalgamation of many other writings how is that violating a copyright (or any differentthan a human doingit)? The copyright claims are absurd.
Yeah! Let’s burn fair use to the ground! Technology is scary! Destroy it all!
I disagree. I think that there should be zero regulation of the datasets as long as the produced content is noticeably derivative, in the same way that humans can produce derivative works using other tools.
Good in theory, Problem is if your bot is given too mutch exposure to a specific piece of media and when the “creativity” value that adds random noise (and for some setups forces it to improvise) is too low, you get whatever impression the content made on the AI, like an imperfect photocopy (non expert, explained “memorization”). Too high and you get random noise.
if your bot is given too mutch exposure to a specific piece of media and when the “creativity” value that adds random noise (and for some setups forces it to improvise) is too low, you get whatever impression the content made on the AI, like an imperfect photocopy
Then it’s a cheap copy, not noticeably derivative, and whoever is hosting the trained bot should probably take it down.
Too high and you get random noise.
Then the bot is trash. Legal and non-infringing, but trash.
There is a happy medium where SD, MJ, and many other text-to-image generators currently exist. You can prompt in such a way (or exploit other vulnerabilities) to create “imperfect photocopies,” but you can also create cheap, infringing works with any number of digital and physical tools.
LLM are not human, the process to train LLM is not human-like, LLM don’t have human needs or desires, or rights for that matter.
comparing it to humans has been a flawed analogy since day 1.
With that mindset, only the powerful will have access to these models.
Places like Reddit, Google, Facebook, etc, places that can rope you into giving away rights to your data with TOS stipulations.
Locking down everything available on the Internet by piling more bullshit onto already draconian copyright rules isn’t the answer and it surprises the shit out of me how quickly fellow artists, writers, and creatives piled onto the side with Disney, the RIAA, and other former enemies the second they started perceiving ML as a threat to their livelihood.
I do believe restrictions should be looked into when it comes to large organizations and industries replacing creators with ML, but attacking open ML models directly is going to result in the common folk losing access to the tools and corporations continuing to work exactly as they are right now by paying for access to locked-down ML based on content from companies who trade in huge amounts of data.
Not to mention it’s going to give the giants who have been leveraging their copyright powers against just about everyone on the internet more power to do just that. That’s the last thing we need.
I think any LLM should be required to be free to use. They can pay for extra bells and whistles like document upload but the core model must be free. They’re free to make their billions, but it shouldn’t be on a model built by scraping all the information of humanity for free.
I understand the sentiment (and agree on moral grounds) but I hink this would put us at an extreme disadvantage in the development of this technology compared to competing nations. Unless you can get all countries to agree and somehow enforce this I think it dramatically hinders our ability to push forward in this space.
They pay for it, simple.
Think about a code that an expert Samsung developer wrote and understanding and executing that flawlessly took 20 years of his/her experience. That person is the only one skilled enough to write it but an LLM model stole it and suggesting it every dev around the world.
That’s a good thing if the dev gets paid to teach the model and then we pay to subscribe to it. Right now it’s breaking the economy. Organisations and startups are abusing the knowledge and laying off skilled occupation.
Nope, you’re looking at it wrong. The Dev got paid to write that code and for all of their 20 years experience. The code was freely given away after that. Nobody loses when knowledge is shared, humanity wins. It gets hairy when you have businesses whose model relies on giving some content away for free and locking some behind a pay wall. Obviously using all of that to train a model without paying anything implies that they never had a subscription, but if they did have one and gave the model access? What’s the difference between that and paying someone to read all those articles? What’s the difference between training a model and paying an employee while training them to expertise? We’re acting like these models are some kind of machine that chops up text and regurgitates it, but that could describe your average college freshman just as well. We’re fast approaching the point where the distinction is meaningless. We can’t treat model training any different from teaching a student.
Could this headline possibly have any more weasel word qualifiers? Lots of things “could” happen.
Also, “start over” is a bit dramatic. I think you mean hit up-enter to rerun the training.
“Hit up-enter” is such a hilarious way of describing the unbelievably vast cost of retraining GPT-4
i guess that bot’s sweatin’ tonight… maybe the stress is what’s causing the errors…
If ChatGPT gets erased and rescanned with new stuff, I can see different “flavors” popping up to replace it. For example: Conservative GPT, no content related to trans, evolution, or climate change. Vetted Wikipedia entries only.
