The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, claiming the two companies built their AI models by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result.
As outlined in the lawsuit, the Times alleges OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.” This “undermine[s] and damage[s]” the Times’ relationship with readers, the outlet alleges, while also depriving it of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”
The complaint also argues that these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism” by hurting the ability of news outlets to protect and monetize content. “Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” the lawsuit states.
The full text of the lawsuit can be found here
This is so fucking ridiculous…
How so?
The trained model includes vast swathes of copyrighted material. It’s the rights holders who get to decide whether someone can use it.
Just because it makes it inconvenient or harder for someone to train an AI model does not justify wholesale stealing.
A lot of models are even trained on large numbers of pirated material like books downloaded from pirate sites etc. I guarantee you OpenAI and others didn’t even buy a lot of the material they use to train the AI models on.
I guarantee you OpenAI and others didn’t even buy a lot of the material they use to train the AI models on.
My hunch is that if they did actually buy or properly license that material, they would have been bankrupt before the first version of ChatGPT came online. And if that’s true, then OpenAI owes it’s entire existence to it’s piracy.
Its not piracy to just webscrap everything for data…
There isn’t a person sitting around and pirating shit, its a Algorithm that takes everything from the internet it can reach.
No it doesn’t, the training data isn’t inside the LLM.
So firstly, even if those claims are true, you sue the wrong business, you would need to sue the training data maker. They however are usually protected by laws for science, because they are “non profit research”
Therefore this is completely ridiculous.
Btw, A the copyright part is only a thing if its a significant portion of the thing… Wich it clearly isn’t in this case (its below 1% of it) making it even more ridiculous.
Also, if you can get the information on the internet, you are again suing the wrong place, you should be after the provider, not the automatic data grabbing system… As they can and will argue that they cant control what their algorithm crawler takes. There is a way to mark content as “dont use” for Mashines, but most people don’t do that and will lose in court because they don’t understand it…
Lastly, the training wouldn’t be harder, the problem is the gathering of data. You can’t manually look through all of it and its idiotic to think that its reasonable to demand such a thing.
No it doesn’t, the training data isn’t inside the LLM.
This is factually incorrect. You can extract the data. How do you think the legal cases are being brought?
The model has to contain the data in order to produce works.
Wholesale commercial copyright infringement where you’re profiting off of others work on a large scale is a whole different ball game.
They’re training their models on large amounts of pirated content and profiting off it.
Of course the rights holders are going to say “wait a minute, why are you making money off my content without my permission? And how much of my work did you pirate to use?”
You cannot hand wave away mass piracy to train their models, and then distribute said models based on an act of mass copyright infringement.
Do you not understand the basics of the law?
its idiotic to think that its reasonable to demand such a thing.
Again, the law is the law. If they mass pirate a bunch of media which then the model contains chunks of they are breaking the law.
I can’t believe this is a hard concept for someone to understand.
the poem poem poem thing shows that the llms actually do memorize at least some training data. chatgpt changed their eula to forbid users from asking it to repeat words forever after this was in the news.
also as far as I understand there are usually fair use and non profit exceptions for use of training data but they generally limit how it can be used. so training a model for commercial purposes might be against the license of the training data.
I don’t necessarily agree with the nyt but they seem to be framing this as someone aggregating their data and packeting it in a better way so they are hurting their profits. i don’t really see that as necessarily being true. they could argue the same about google news showing their news…
Really seemed like this was inevitable - it will be interesting to see if their fair use defense pans out.
I don’t expect it will, and I’m worried of the impact of that precedent on the legitimate fair use circuit…
Is AI just a giant screen scraper with a presentation layer? I always thought of it more like Asimov’s positronic brain.
