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.
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.
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.
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.
They might look down upon that but I doubt they’ll rule against NYT entirely. The AI isn’t a separate agent from OpenAI either. If the AI infringes on copyright, then so does OpenAI.
Copyright applies to reproduction of a work so if they build any machine that is capable of doing that (they did) then they are liable for it.
Seems like the solution here is to train data to not output copyrighted works and to maybe train a sub-system to detect it and stop the main chatbot from responding with it.
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).
True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.
Tell me you haven’t actually read legal opinions on the subject without telling me…
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.
Machines aren’t people and it’s fine and reasonable to have different standards for each.
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?
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.
Lemmy users in general loves to steal IP, no shock this post didn’t get the love it deserved
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.
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.
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.
17 USC § 106, exclusive rights in copyrighted works:
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Clearly, this is capable of reproducing a work, and is derivative of the work. I would argue that it’s displayed publicly as well, if you can use it without an account.
You could argue fair use, but I doubt this use would meet any of the four test factors, let alone all of them.
Training on copyrighted data should be allowed as long as it’s something publicly posted.
Only if the end result of that training is also something public. OpenAI shouldn’t be making money on anything except ads if they’re using copyright material without paying for it.
Why an exception for ads if you’re going that route? Wouldn’t advertisers deserve the same protections as other creatives?
Personally, since they’re not making copies of the input (beyond what’s transiently required for processing), and they’re not distributing copies, I’m not sure why copyright would come into play.
Only publishing it is a copyright issue. You can also obtain copyrighted material with a web browser. The onus is on the person who publishes any material they put together, regardless of source. OpenAI is not responsible for publishing just because their tool was used to obtain the material.
There are issues other than publishing, but that’s the biggest one. But they are not acting merely as a conduit for the work, they are ingesting it and deriving new work from it. The use of the copyrighted work is integral to their product, which makes it a big deal.
Yeah, the ingestion part is still to be determined legally, but I think OpenAI will be ok. NYT produces content to be read, and copyright only protects them from people republishing their content. People also ingest their content and can make derivative works without problem. OpenAI are just doing the same, but at a level of ability that could be disruptive to some companies. This isn’t even really very harmful to the NYT, since the historical material used doesn’t even conflict with their primary purpose of producing new news. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out though.
