OpenAI insists training AI models on copyrighted data is fair use.

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.

  • LWD@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.”