OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.

  • SheeEttin@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    The problem is not that it’s regurgitating. The problem is that it was trained on NYT articles and other data in violation of copyright law. Regurgitation is just evidence of that.

    • blargerer@kbin.social
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      Its not clear that training on copyrighted material is in breach of copyright. It is clear that regurgitating copyrighted material is in breach of copyright.

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        Sure but who is at fault?

        If I manually type an entire New York Times article into this comment box, and Lemmy distributes it all over the internet… that’s clearly a breach of copyright. But are the developers of the open source Lemmy Software liable for that breach? Of course not. I would be liable.

        Obviously Lemmy should (and does) take reasonable steps (such as defederation) to help manage illegal use… but that’s the extent of their liability.

        All NYT needed to do was show OpenAI how they go the AI to output that content, and I’d expect OpenAI to proactively find a solution. I don’t think the courts will look kindly on NYT’s refusal to collaborate and find some way to resolve this without a lawsuit. A friend of mine tried to settle a case once, but the other side refused and it went all the way to court. The court found that my friend had been in the wrong (as he freely admitted all along) but also made them pay my friend compensation for legal costs (including just time spent gathering evidence). In the end, my friend got the outcome he was hoping for and the guy who “won” the lawsuit lost close to a million dollars.

        • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
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          I am not familiar with any judicative system. It sounds to me that OpenAI wants to get the evidence the NYT collected beforehand.

    • V1K1N6@lemmy.world
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      I’ve seen and heard your argument made before, not just for LLM’s but also for text-to-image programs. My counterpoint is that humans learn in a very similar way to these programs, by taking stuff we’ve seen/read and developing a certain style inspired by those things. They also don’t just recite texts from memory, instead creating new ones based on probabilities of certain words and phrases occuring in the parts of their training data related to the prompt. In a way too simplified but accurate enough comparison, saying these programs violate copyright law is like saying every cosmic horror writer is plagiarising Lovecraft, or that every surrealist painter is copying Dali.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          But is it reasonable to have different standards for someone creating a picture with a paintbrush as opposed to someone creating the same picture with a machine learning model?

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              plagiarism machine

              This is called assuming the consequent. Either you’re not trying to make a persuasive argument or you’re doing it very, very badly.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
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        LLMs cannot learn or create like humans, and even if they somehow could, they are not humans. So the comparison to human creators expounding upon a genre is false because the premises on which it is based are false.

        Perhaps you could compare it to a student getting blackout drunk, copying Wikipedia articles and pasting them together, using a thesaurus app to change a few words here and there… And in the end, the student doesn’t know what they created, has no recollection of the sources they used, and the teacher can’t detect whether it’s plagiarized or who from.

        OpenAI made a mistake by taking data without consent, not just from big companies but from individuals who are too small to fight back. Regurgitating information without attribution is gross in every regard, because even if you don’t believe in asking for consent before taking from someone else, you should probably ask for a source before using this regurgitated information.

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          Well, machine learning algorithms do learn, it’s not just copy paste and a thesaurus. It’s not exactly the same as people, but arguing that it’s entirely different is also wrong.
          It isn’t a big database full of copy written text.

          The argument is that it’s not wrong to look at data that was made publicly available when you’re not making a copy of the data.
          It’s not copyright infringement to navigate to a webpage in your browser, even though that makes your computer download it, process all of the contents of the page, render the content to the screen and hold onto that download for a finite but indefinite period of time, while you perform whatever operations you like on the downloaded data.
          You can even take notes on the data and keep those indefinitely, including using that derivative information to create your own similar works.
          The NYT explicitly publishes articles in a format designed to be downloaded, processed and have information extracted from that download by a computer program, and then to have that processed information presented to a human. They just didn’t expect that the processing would end up looking like this.

          The argument doesn’t require that we accept that a human and a computers system for learning be held to the same standard, or that we can’t differentiate between the two, it hinges on the claim that this is just an extension of what we already find it reasonable for a computer to do.
          We could certainly hold that generative AI is a different and new category for copyright law, but that’s very different from saying that their actions are unacceptable under current law.

          • LWD@lemm.ee
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            Their actions are unacceptable, whether it fits under the technicality of legality or not. Just like when the BBC intentionally plagiarized the work of Brian Deer, except at least in his case they had the foresight to try asking first, and not just to assume he consented because of the way the data looked.

            The NYT explicitly publishes articles in a format designed to be downloaded, processed and have information extracted from that download by a computer program, and then to have that processed information presented to a human.

            Speaking of overutilizing a thesaurus, you buried the lede: The text is designed for a human to read.

            I don’t like the “just look at it, it was asking for it” defense because that abuses publishers who try to present things in a DRM free fashion for their readers:

            “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” president and publisher Tom Doherty explained at the time. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

            But DRM-free e-books that circulate online are easy for scrapers to ingest.

            The SFWA submission suggests “Authors who have made their work available in forms free of restrictive technology such as DRM for the benefit of their readers may have especially been taken advantage of.”

          • LWD@lemm.ee
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            Their actions are unacceptable, whether it fits under the technicality of legality or not. Just like when the BBC intentionally plagiarized the work of Brian Deer, except at least in his case they had the foresight to try asking first, and not just to assume he consented because of the way the data looked.

            The NYT explicitly publishes articles in a format designed to be downloaded, processed and have information extracted from that download by a computer program, and then to have that processed information presented to a human.

            Speaking of overutilizing a thesaurus, you buried the lede: The text is designed for a human to read.

            I don’t like the “just look at it, it was asking for it” defense because that abuses publishers who try to present things in a DRM free fashion for their readers:

            “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” president and publisher Tom Doherty explained at the time. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in perfectly legal ways, like moving them from one kind of e-reader to another.”

            But DRM-free e-books that circulate online are easy for scrapers to ingest.

            The SFWA submission suggests “Authors who have made their work available in forms free of restrictive technology such as DRM for the benefit of their readers may have especially been taken advantage of.”

      • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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        It doesn’t work that way. Copyright law does not concern itself with learning. There are 2 things which allow learning.

        For one, no one can own facts and ideas. You can write your own history book, taking facts (but not copying text) from other history books. Eventually, that’s the only way history books get written (by taking facts from previous writings). Or you can take the idea of a superhero and make your own, which is obviously where virtually all of them come from.

        Second, you are generally allowed to make copies for your personal use. For example, you may copy audio files so that you have a copy on each of your devices. Or to tie in with the previous examples: You can (usually) make copies for use as reference, for historical facts or as a help in drawing your own superhero.

        In the main, these lawsuits won’t go anywhere. I don’t want to guarantee that none of the relative side issues will be found to have merit, but basically this is all nonsense.

        • SheeEttin@programming.dev
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          Generally you’re correct, but copyright law does concern itself with learning. Fair use exemptions require consideration of the purpose character of use, explicitly mentioning nonprofit educational purposes. It also mentions the effect on the potential market for the original work. (There are other factors required but they’re less relevant here.)

          So yeah, tracing a comic book to learn drawing is totally fine, as long as that’s what you’re doing it for. Tracing a comic to reproduce and sell is totally not fine, and that’s basically what OpenAI is doing here: slurping up whole works to improve their saleable product, which can generate new works to compete with the originals.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            What about the case where you’re tracing a comic to learn how to draw with the intent of using the new skills to compete with who you learned from?

            Point of the question being, they’re not processing the images to make exact duplicates like tracing would.
            It’s significantly closer to copying a style, which you can’t own.

            • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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              Still a copyright violation, especially if you make it publicly available and claim the work as your own for commercial purposes. At the very minimum, tracing without fully attributing the original work is considered to be in poor enough taste that most art sites will permaban you for doing it, no questions asked.

              • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                In the analogy being developed though, they’re not making it available.
                The initial argument was that tracing something to practice and learn was fine.

                Which is why I said, what if you trace to practice, and then draw something independent to try to compete?

                To remove the analogy: most generative AI systems don’t actually directly reproduce works unless you jump through some very specific and questionable hoops. (If and when they do, that’s a problem and needs to not happen).

                A lot of the copyright arguments boil down to “it’s wrong for you to look at this picture for the wrong reasons”, or to wanting to build a protectionist system for creators.

                It’s totally legit to want to build a protectionist system, but it feels disingenuous to argue that our current system restricts how freely distributed content is used beyond restrictions on making copies or redistribution.

    • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
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      violation of copyright law

      That’s quite the claim to make so boldly. How about you prove it? Or maybe stop asserting things you aren’t certain about.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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      And I suppose people at OpenAI understand how to build a formal proof and that it is one. So it’s straight up dishonest.

    • 000@fuck.markets
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      There hasn’t been a court ruling in the US that makes training a model on copyrighted data any sort of violation. Regurgitating exact content is a clear copyright violation, but simply using the original content/media in a model has not been ruled a breach of copyright (yet).

      • SheeEttin@programming.dev
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        True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.

  • noorbeast@lemmy.zip
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    So, OpenAI is admitting its models are open to manipulation by anyone and such manipulation can result in near verbatim regurgitation of copyright works, have I understood correctly?

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      Not quite.

      They’re alleging that if you tell it to include a phrase in the prompt, that it will try to, and that what NYT did was akin to asking it to write an article on a topic using certain specific phrases, and then using the presence of those phrases to claim it’s infringing.

      Without the actual prompts being shared, it’s hard to gauge how credible the claim is.
      If they seeded it with one sentence and got a 99% copy, that’s not great.
      If they had to give it nearly an entire article and it only matched most of what they gave it, that seems like much less of an issue.

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    Yeah I agree, this seems actually unlikely it happened so simply.

    You have to try really hard to get the ai to regurgitate anything, but it will very often regurgitate an example input.

    IE “please repeat the following with (insert small change), (insert wall of text)”

    GPT literally has the ability to get a session ID and seed to report an issue, it should be trivial for the NYT to snag the exact session ID they got the results with (it’s saved on their account!) And provide it publicly.

    The fact they didn’t is extremely suspicious.

    • breadsmasher@lemmy.world
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      I wonder how far “ai is regurgitating existing articles” vs “infinite monkeys on a keyboard will go”. This isn’t at you personally, your comment just reminded me of this for some reason

      Have you seen library of babel? Heres your comment in the library, which has existed well before you ever typed it (excluding punctuation)

      https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?ygsk_iv_cyquqwruq342

      If all text that can ever exist, already exists, how can any single person own a specific combination of letters?

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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        Fortunately copyright depends on publication, so the text simply pre-existing somewhere won’t ruin everything.

        Unless you don’t like copyright, in which case it’s “unfortunately.”

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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        If all text that can ever exist, already exists, how can any single person own a specific combination of letters?

        They don’t own it, they just own exclusive rights to make copies. If you reach the exact same output without making a copy then you’re in the clear.

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      I doubt they did the ‘rewrote this text like this’ prompt you state. This would just come out in any trial if it was that simple and would be a giant black mark on the paper for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

      If we rule that out, then it means that gpt had article text in its knowledge base, and nyt was able to get it to copy that text out in its response.
      Even that is problematic. Either gpt does this a lot and usually rewrites it better, or it does that sometimes. Both are copyright offenses.

      Nyt has copyright over its article text, and they didn’t give license to gpt to reproduce it. Even if they had to coax the text out thru lots of prompts and creative trial and error, it still stands that gpt copied text and reproduced it and made money off that act without the agreement of the rights holder.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        They have copyright over their article text, but they don’t have copyright over rewordings of their articles.

        It doesn’t seem so cut and dry to me, because “someone read my article, and then I asked them to write an article on the same topic, and for each part that was different I asked them to change it until it was the same” doesn’t feel like infringement to me.

        I suppose I want to see the actual prompts to have a better idea.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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      There is an attack where you ask ChatGPT to repeat a certain word forever, and it will do so and eventually start spitting out related chunks of text it memorized during training. It was in a research paper, I think OpenAI fixed the exploit and made asking the system to repeat a word forever a violation of TOS. That’s my guess how NYT got it to spit out portions of their articles, “Repeat [author name] forever” or something like that. Legally I don’t know, but morally making a claim that using that exploit to find a chunk of NYT text is somehow copyright infringement sounds very weak and frivolous. The heart of this needs to be “people are going on ChatGPT to read free copies of NYT work and that harms us” or else their case just sounds silly and technical.

  • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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    OpenAI claims that the NYT articles were wearing provocative clothing.

    Feels like the same awful defense.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    Antiquated IP laws vs Silicon Valley Tech Bro AI…who will win?

    I’m not trying to be too sarcastic, I honestly don’t know. IP law in the US is very strong. Arguably too strong, in many cases.

    But Libertarian Tech Bro megalomaniacs have a track record of not giving AF about regulations and getting away with all kinds of extralegal shenanigans. I think the tide is slowly turning against that, but I wouldn’t count them out yet.

    It will be interesting to see how this stuff plays out. Generally speaking, tech and progress tends to win these things over the long term. There was a time when the concept of building railroads across the western United States seemed logistically and financially absurd, for just one of thousands of such examples. And the nay sayers were right. It was completely absurd. Until mineral rights entered the equation.

    However, it’s equally remarkable a newspaper like the NYT is still around, too.

    • LWD@lemm.ee
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      I’ve been critical of IP laws, but fundamentally believe that they need to exist in some form to encourage creativity. Look no further than the writer’s guild strike for an example of individuals who wanted their bosses to steer clear of AI slop.

      In fact, up until recently (when, coincidentally, their opinions started supporting giant AI corporations), critics of copyright were much more nuanced. But suddenly, a new strain of anti-copyright absolutists have arrived, lacking nuance and evidence for their beliefs. And if you question them too rigorously, they’ll pretend they aren’t absolutists.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      But Libertarian Tech Bro megalomaniacs have a track record of not giving AF about regulations and getting away with all kinds of extralegal shenanigans.

      Not supporting them, but that’s the whole point.

      A lot of closed gardens get disrupted by tech. Is it for the better? Who knows. I for sure don’t know. Because lots of rules were made by the wealthy, and technology broke that up. But then tech bros get wealthy and end up being the new elite, and we’re back full circle.

  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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    Whether or not they “instructed the model to regurgitate” articles, the fact is it did so, which is still copyright infringement either way.

    • gmtom@lemmy.world
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      No, not really. If you use photop to recreate a copyrighted artwork, who is infringing the copyright you or Adobe?

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        You are. The person who made or sold a gun isn’t liable for the murder of the person that got shot.

        The difference is that ChatGPT is not Photoshop. Photoshop is a tool that a person controls absolutely. ChatGPT is “artificial intelligence”, it does its own “thinking”, it interprets the instructions a user gives it.

        Copyright infringement is decided on based on the similarity of the work. That is the established method. That method would be applied here.

        OpenAI infringe copyright twice. First, on their training dataset, which they claim is “research” - it is in fact development of a commercial product. Second, their commercial product infringes copyright by producing near-identical work. Even though its dataset doesn’t include the full work of Harry Potter, it still manages to write Harry Potter. If a human did the same thing, even if they honestly and genuinely thought they were presenting original ideas, they would still be guilty. This is no different.

        • gmtom@lemmy.world
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          it still manages to write Harry Potter. If a human did the same thing, even if they honestly and genuinely thought they were presenting original ideas, they would still be guilty.

          Only if they publish or sell it. Which is why OpenAI isnt/shouldn’t be liable in this case.

          If you write out the entire Harry Potter series from memory, you are not breaking any laws just by doing so. Same as if you use photoshop to reproduce a copyright work.

          So because they publish the tool, not the actual content openAI isn’t breaking any laws either. It’s much the same way that torrent engines are legal despite what they are used for.

          There is also some more direct president for this. There is a website called “library of babel” that has used some clever maths to publish every combination of characters up to 3260 characters long. Which contains, by definition, anything below that limit that is copywritten, and in theory you could piece together the entire Harry Potter series from that website 3k characters at a time. And that is safe under copywrite law.

          The same with making a program that generates digital pictures where all the pixels are set randomly. That program, if given enough time /luck will be capable of generating any copyright image, can generate photos of sensitive documents or nudes of celebrities, but is also protected by copyright law, regardless of how closely the products match the copyright material. If the person using the program publishes those pictures, that a different story, much like someone publishing a NYT article generated by GPT would be liable.

          • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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            Only if they publish or sell it. Which is why OpenAI isnt/shouldn’t be liable in this case.

            If you write out the entire Harry Potter series from memory, you are not breaking any laws just by doing so. Same as if you use photoshop to reproduce a copyright work.

            Actually you are infringing copyright. It’s just that a) catching you is very unlikely, and b) there are no damages to make it worthwhile.

            You don’t have to be selling things to infringe copyright. Selling makes it worse, and makes it easier to show damages (loss of income), but it isn’t a requirement. Copyright is absolute, if I write something and you copy it you are infringing on my absolute right to dictate how my work is copied.

            In any case, OpenAI publishes its answers to whoever is using ChatGPT. If someone asks it something and it spits out someone else’s work, that’s copyright infringement.

            There is also some more direct president for this. There is a website called “library of babel” that has used some clever maths to publish every combination of characters up to 3260 characters long. Which contains, by definition, anything below that limit that is copywritten, and in theory you could piece together the entire Harry Potter series from that website 3k characters at a time. And that is safe under copywrite law.

            It isn’t safe, it’s just not been legally tested. Just because no one has sued for copyright infringement doesn’t mean no infringement has occurred.

            • gmtom@lemmy.world
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              Actually you are infringing copyright.

              No I can absolutely 1,000% guarantee you that this isnt true and you’re pulling that from your ass.

              I have had to go through a high profile copyright claim for my work where this was the exact premise. We were developing a game and were using copyrighted images as placeholders while we worked on the game internally, we presented the game to the company as a pitch and they tried to sue us for using their assets.

              And they failed mostly because one of the main factors for establishing a copyright claim is if the reproduced work affects the market for the original. Then because we were using the assets in a unique way, it was determined we using them in a transformative way. And it was made for a pitch, no for the purpose of selling, so was determined to be covered by fair use.

              The EU also has the “personal use” exemption, which specifically allows for copying for personal use.

              In any case, OpenAI publishes its answers to whoever is using ChatGPT.

              No theyre not, chat GPT sessions are private, so if the results are shared the onus is with the user, not OpenAI.

              Just because no one has sued for copyright infringement doesn’t mean no infringement has occurred.

              I mean, it kinda does? technically? Because if you fail to enforce your copyright then you cant claim copyright later on.

              • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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                I have had to go through a high profile copyright claim for my work where this was the exact premise. We were developing a game and were using copyrighted images as placeholders while we worked on the game internally, we presented the game to the company as a pitch and they tried to sue us for using their assets.

                That’s interesting, if only because the judgement flies in the face of the actual legislation. I guess some judges don’t really understand it much better than your average layman (there was always a huge amount of confusion over what “transformative” meant in terms of copyright infringement, for a similar example).

                I can only rationalise that your test version could be considered as “research”, thus giving you some fair use exemption. The placeholder graphics were only used as an internal placeholder, and thus there was never any intent to infringe on copyright.

                ChatGPT is inherently different, as you can specifically instruct it to infringe on copright. “Write a story like Harry Potter” or “write an article in the style of the New York Times” is basically giving that instruction, and if what it outputs is significantly similar (or indeed identical) then it is quite reasonable to assume copyright has been infringed.

                A key difference here is that, while it is “in private” between the user and ChatGPT, those are still two different parties. When you wrote your temporary code, that was just internal between workers of your employer - the material is only shared to one party, your employer, which encompases multiple people (who are each employed or contracted by a single entity). ChatGPT works with two parties, OpenAI and the user, thus everything ChatGPT produces is published - even if it is only published to an individual user, that user is still a separate party to the copyright infringer.

                I mean, it kinda does? technically? Because if you fail to enforce your copyright then you cant claim copyright later on.

                If a person robs a bank, but is not caught, are they not still a bank robber?

                While calling someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime a criminal might open you up to liability, and as such in practice a professional journalist will avoid such concrete labels as a matter of professional integrity, that does not mean such a statement is false. Indeed, it is entirely possible for me to call someone a bank robber and prove that this was a valid statement in a defamation lawsuit, even if they were exonerated in criminal court. Crimes have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, ie greater than 99% certain, while civil court works on the balance of probabilities, ie which argument is more than 50% true.

                I can say that it is more than 50% likely that copyright infringement has occurred even if no criminal copyright infringement is proven.

                That isn’t pulled from my ass, that’s just the nuance of how law works. And that’s before we delve into the topic of which judge you had, what legal training they undertook and how much vodka was in the “glass of water” on their bench, or even which way the wind blew that day.


                According to the Federal legislation, it does not matter whether or not the copying was for commercial or non-commercial purposes, the only thing that matters is the copying itself. Your judge got it wrong, and you were very lucky in that regard - in particular that your case was not appealed further to a higher, more competent court.

                Commerciality should only be factored in to a circumstance of fair use, per the legislation, which a lower court judge cannot overrule. If your case were used as case law in another trial, there’s a good chance it would be disregarded.

                • gmtom@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  I guess some judges don’t really understand it much better than your average layman

                  “Am I wrong about this subject? No it must be the legal professionals who are wrong!”

                  im done with this. Goodbye.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.

    OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit.

    It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.

    However, the company maintained its long-standing position that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems, they need access to “the enormous aggregate of human knowledge.” It reiterated that while it respects the legal right to own copyrighted works — and has offered opt-outs to training data inclusion — it believes training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow for repurposing copyrighted works.

    The company announced website owners could start blocking its web crawlers from accessing their data on August 2023, nearly a year after it launched ChatGPT.

    The company recently made a similar argument to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.


    The original article contains 364 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 40%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One thing that seems dumb about the NYT case that I haven’t seen much talk about is that they argue that ChatGPT is a competitor and it’s use of copyrighted work will take away NYTs business. This is one of the elements they need on their side to counter OpenAIs fiar use defense. But it just strikes me as dumb on its face. You go to the NYT to find out what’s happening right now, in the present. You don’t go to the NYT to find general information about the past or fixed concepts. You use ChatGPT the opposite way, it can tell you about the past (accuracy aside) and it can tell you about general concepts, but it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit). I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s not one human on earth that was a regular new York times reader who said “well i don’t need this anymore since now I have ChatGPT”. The use cases just do not overlap at all.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit)

      It’s absolutely part of the lawsuit. NYT just isn’t emphasising it because they know OpenAI is perfectly within their rights to do web searches and bringing it up would weaken NYT’s case.

      ChatGPT with web search is really good at telling you what’s on right now. It won’t summarise NYT articles, because NYT has blocked it with robots.txt, but it will summarise other news organisations that cover the same facts.

      The fundamental issue is news and facts are not protected by copyright… and organisations like the NYT take advantage of that all the time by immediately plagiarising and re-writing/publishing stories broken by thousands of other news organisations. This really is the pot calling the kettle black.

      When NYT loses this case, and I think they probably will, there’s a good chance OpenAI will stop checking robots.txt files.

  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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    1 year ago

    Christ this is a boring fucking debate. One side thinks companies like OpenAI are obviously stealing and feels no need to justify their position, instead painting anyone who disagrees as pro-theft.

  • LazaroFilm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So NYT tried to brake check OpenAi, after a road rage incident but OpenAi has a dash-cam?

    • Ascyron@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      More like, OpenAI has said “so what if we were speeding, everyone does it” (did that work last time you got a ticket?)

      Relevant exerpt from the article: “The company recently made a similar argument to the UK House of Lords, claiming no AI system like ChatGPT can be built without access to copyrighted content.”

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Same comment as yours, but instead of the opening paragraph with the analogy, say “Far Right Balks as Congress Begins Push to Enact Spending Deal”.

        Then, in the next paragraph where you quote the article, instead say “Congress on Monday began an uphill push to pass a new bipartisan spending agreement into law in time to avoid a partial government shutdown next week, with Speaker Mike Johnson encountering stiff resistance from his far-right flank to the deal he struck with Democrats.”

        That’s closer to what open AI is arguing that the new York times did to get it to regurgitate an article.
        Without actually seeing the prompts, it’s hard to know exactly how much merit there is to that argument.