The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

If NYT wins this, then there is going to be a massive push for payouts from basically everyone ever…I don’t see that wallet being fat for long.

If this is inevitable (and I'm not saying it's not), who will produce high quality news content?

What incentive do people have to publish work if their work is going to primarily be consumed by a LLM and spat out without attribution at people who are using the LLM?

Maybe a specific example will help here. An Author spends a year writing a technical book, researching subtle technical issues, creating original code and finding novel ways of explaining difficult abstractions.

A few weeks after the release it finds books on Amazon who plagiarized the book. Finds copies of the book available for free from Russian sites, and ChatGPT spitting verbatim parts of the source code on the book.

Which parts of copyright law would you say are out of date for the example above?

The cost of copying and publishing has been almost irrelevant to the need for copyright at least since the times of the printing press. In fact, when copying books was extremely expensive work, copyright was not even that needed - the physical book was about as valuable as the contents, so no money was there to be made from copying someone else's work vs coming up with your own.

The original intent was to provide an incentive for human authors to publish work, but has become more out of touch since the internet allowed virtually free publishing and copying. I think with the dawn of LLMs, copyright law is now mainly incentivising lawyers.

And yet the content industry still creates massive profits every year from people buying content.

I think internet-native people can forget that internet piracy doesn’t immediately make copyright obsolete simply because someone can copy an article or a movie if sufficiently motivated. These businesses still exist because copyright allows them to monetize their work.

Eliminating copyright and letting anyone resell or copy anything would end production of the content many people enjoy. You can’t remove content protections and also maintain the existence of the same content we have now.

What? This is about whether one country wants to cede a massive economic advantage to another country.

You've missed the point he was making -- that Chinese and Russian companies don't care about American copyright and will do whatever is in their interest.

And although you were being flippant, yes, Chinese LLMs are bad actors.

I don’t really see it as good guys or bad guys - just that China (and Russia) don’t really care too much about American copyright.

And there seems to be an an obvious advantage from my perspective to having an information vacuum that is not bound by any kind of copyright law.

If that’s good or bad is more of a matter of opinion.

The word ‘moot’ does not mean what you think it means.

It's impossible to "steal" intellectual property without some kind of mind wiping device.

Ok, let’s address this from the standpoint of a node in the network of the thoughtscape. A denizen of the “inter”net, and also a victim of the exploitive nature of artists.

Media amalgamated power by farming the lives of “common” people for content, and attempt to use that content to manage lives of both the commons and unique, under the auspice of entertainmet. Which in and of itself is obviously a narrative convention which infers implied consent (id ask to what facetiously).

Keepsake of the gods if you will…

We are discussing these systems as though they are new (ai and the like, not the apple of iOS), they are not…

this is an obfuscation of the actual theft that’s been taking place (against us by us, not others).

There is something about reaping what you sow written down somewhere, just gotta find it.

-mic

Countless Americans are happily 'stealing' intellectual property everyday from other Americans by accessing two websites — SciHub and LibGen — who owe their very existence to them being hosted in foreign countries with weak intellectual property protection and not being subject to US long-arm jurisdiction. Even on this website, using sites like archive.is (which would be illegal if they operated in the US) to bypass paywalls to access copyrighted material is common and rarely frowned upon. I doubt a culture of respecting copyright is as characteristic of "us" as you seem to think.

For some definitions of “working”.

Sorry, how exactly LLM threatens NYT? Are people supposed to generate news themselves? Or like wait a year or so before NYT articles are consumed by LMMs?

I’m ambivalent.

On the one hand, they should realize they are one of today’s horse carriage manufacturers. They’ll only survive in very narrow realms (someone has to build the Central Park horse carriages still), but they will be miniscule in size and importance.

On the other hand, LLMs should observe copyright and not be immune to copyright.

Chinese LLMs are clearly trained to avoid answering certain topics that their government deems sensitive

But they're not; you can download open source Chinese base models like Yi and Deepseek and ask them about Tianmen Square yourself and see, they don't have any special filtering.

Russian and Chinese consumers are less interested in English-language articles.

Isn't it just one additional step to automatically translate them?

IANAL but it seems super likely to me that this will be found to be infringing sooner or later.

It better. Copyright has essentially fucking ceased to exist in the eyes of AI people. Just because you have a shiny new toy doesn't mean the law suddenly stops applying to you. The internet does its best to route around laws and government but the more technologically up to date bureaucracy becomes, the faster it will catch up.

It's not exactly a synthetic brain though, is it? LLMs are more like lookup tables for the texts they're trained on.

We will not have "AIs as capable as humans" in a couple decades. AIs will keep being tools used by humans. If you use copyrighted texts as input to a digital transformation, that's vopyright infringement. It's essentially the same situation as sampling in music, and imo the same solutions can be applied here: e.g. licenses with royalties.

We have this now with humans. I've been in a lifelong sruggle for knowledge and tools that I can afford.

Copyright doesn’t protect data, it only protects expression.

The issue here is that the case law is not settled at all and there is no clear consensus on whether OpenAI is violating any copyright laws. In novel cases like this where the courts essentially have to invent new legal doctrines, I think the implications of the decision carries a tremendous amount of weight with the judges and justices who have to make that decision.

"Why can't AI at least cite its source" each article seen alters the weights a tiny, non-human understandable amount. it doesn't have a source, unless you think of the whole humongous corpus that it is trained on

A neural net is not a database where the original source is sitting somewhere in an obvious place with a reference. A neural net is a black box of functions that have been automatically fit to the training data. There is no way to know what sources have been memorized vs which have made their mark by affecting other types of functions in the neural net.

If you're going to consider training ai as fair use, you'll have all kinds of different people with different skill levels training ais that work in different ways on the corpus.

Not all of them will have the capability to cite a source, and plenty of them won't have it make sense to cite a source.

Eg. Suppose I train a regression that guesses how many words will be in a book.

Which book do I cite when I do an inference? All of them?

There's a few levels to this...

Would it be more rigorous for AI to cite its sources? Sure, but the same could be said for humans too. Wikipedia editors, scholars, and scientists all still struggle with proper citations. NYT itself has been caught plagiarizing[1].

But that doesn't really solve the underlying issue here: That our copyright laws and monetization models predate the Internet and the ease of sharing/paywall bypass/piracy. The models that made sense when publishing was difficult and required capital-intensive presses don't necessarily make sense in the copy and paste world of today. Whether it's journalists or academics fighting over scraps just for first authorship (while some random web dev makes 3x more money on ad tracking), it's just not a long-term sustainable way to run an information economy.

I'd also argue that attribution isn't really that important to most people to begin with. Stuff, real and fake, gets shared on social media all the time with limited fact-checking (for better or worse). In general, people don't speak in a rigorous scholarly way. And people are often wrong, with faulty memories, or even incentivized falsehoods. Our primate brains aren't constantly in fact-checking mode and we respond better to emotional, plot-driven narratives than cold statistics. There are some intellectuals who really care deeply about attributions, but most humans won't.

Taken the above into consideration:

1) Useful AI does not necessarily require attribution

2) AI piracy is just a continuation of decades of digital piracy, and the solutions that didn't work in the 1990s and 2000s still won't work against AI

3) We need some better way to fund human creativity, especially as it gets more and more commoditized

4) This is going to happen with or without us. Cat's outta the bag.

I don't think using old IP law to hold us back is really going to solve anything in the long term. Yes, it'd be classy of OpenAI to pay everyone it sourced from, but long term that doesn't matter. Creativity has always been shared and copied and imitated and stolen, the only question is whether the creators get compensated (or even enriched) in the meantime. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it happens regardless. There'll always be noncommercial posts by the billions of people who don't care if AI, or a search engine, or Twitter, or whoever, profits off them.

If we get anywhere remotely close to AGI, a lot of this won't matter. Our entire economic and legal systems will have to be redone. Maybe we can finally get rid of the capitalist and lawyer classes. Or they'll probably just further enslave the rest of us with the help of their robo-bros, giving AI more rights than poor people.

But either way, this is way bigger than the economics of 19th-century newspapers...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fa...

A human can't credit the source of each element of everything they've learnt. AI's can't either, and for the same reason.

The knowledge gets distorted, blended, and reinterpreted a million ways by the time it's given as output.

And the metadata (metaknowledge?) would be larger than the knowledge itself. The AI learnt every single concept it knows by reading online; including the structure of grammar, rules of logic, the meaning of words, how they relate to one another. You simply couldn't cite it all.

Why do you expect an AI to cite it's source? Humans are allowed to use and profit on knowledge they've learned from any and all sources without having to mention or even remember their sources.

Yes, we all agree that it's better if they do remember and mention their sources, but we don't sue them for failing to do so.

If you ask the AI to cite its sources, it will. It will hallucinate some of them, but in the last few months it's gotten really good at sending me to the right web page or Amazon book link for its sources.

Thing is though, if you look at the prompts they used to elicit the material, the prompt was already citing the NYTimes and its articles by name.

I think the gap between attributable knowledge and absorbed knowledge is pretty difficult to bridge. For news stuff, if I read the same general story from NYT and LA Times and WaPo then I'll start to get confused about which bit I got from which publication. In some ways, being able to verbatim quote long passages is a failure to generalize that should be fixed rather than reinforced.

Though the other way to do it is to clearly document the training data as a whole, even if you can't cite a specific entry in it for a particular bit of generated output. It should get useless quickly though as you'd eventually have one big citation -- "The Internet"

Why can't AI at least cite its source?

Because AI models aren't databases.

I mean maybe not the single most important development, but definitely a very important technological development with the potential to revolutionize multiple industries

I think you are looking at current AI product rather than the underlying technology. It's like saying that the wheel is a useless invention because it has only been used for unicycles so far. I'm sure that AI will have huge impacts in medicine (assisting diagnosis from medical tests) and agriculture (identifying issues with areas of crops, scanning for diseases and increasing automation of food processing) as well as likely nearly every other field.

I don't know if I would agree that it is "probably the single most important development in human history" but I think that it is way to early to make a reasonable guess of if it will or not.

Also the assumption a publication that’s been around for 150 years is disposable, not the web application that was created a year ago. I’ve been saying for a while that people’s credulity and impulse to believe absolutely any storyline related to technology is off the charts.

Better than medicine, agriculture, electrification, or music?

Shoulders of giants.

Thanks to the existence of medicine, agriculture, and electrification (we can argue about music), some people are now healthy, well fed, and sufficiently supplied with enough electricity to go make LLMs.

I hope the NYT is compensated for the theft of their IP and hopefully more lawsuits follow.

Personally I think all these "theft of IP" lawsuits are (mostly) destined to fail. Not because I'm on a particular side per-se (though I am), but because it's trying to fit a square law into a round hole.

This is going to be a job for legislature sooner or later.

Everyone learns from papers. That's the point of them, isn't it? Except we pay, what, $4 per Sunday paper or $10/mo for the digital edition? Why should a robot have to pay much more just because it's better at absorbing information?

Why shouldn't the creators of the training content get anything for their efforts?

Well, they didn't charge for it, right? They're retroactively asking for money, but they could have just locked their content behind a strict paywall or had a specific licensing agreement enforceable ahead of time. They could do that going forward, but how is it fair for them to go back and say that?

And the issue isn't "You didn't pay us" it's "This infringes our copyright", which historically the answer has been "no it doesn't".

The issue as I see it is that every bit of data that the model ingested in training has affected what the model _is_ and therefore every token of output from the model has benefited from every token of input. When you receive anything from an LLM, you are essentially receiving a customized digest of all the training data. The second issue is that it takes an enormous amount of training data to train a model. In order to enable users to extract ‘anything’ from the model, the model has to be trained on ‘everything’. So I think these models should be looked at as public goods that consume everything and can produce anything. To have to keep a paper trail on the ‘everything’ part (the input) and send a continuous little trickle of capital to all of the sources is missing the point. That’s like a person having to pay a little bit of money to all of their teachers and mentors and everyone they’ve learned from every time they benefit from what they learned.

OpenAI isn’t marching into the online news space and posting NY Times content verbatim in an effort to steal market share from the NY Times. OpenAI is in the business of turning ‘everything’ (input tokens) into ‘anything’ (output tokens). If someone manages to extract a preserved chunk of input tokens, that’s more like an interesting edge case of the model. It’s not what the model is in the business of doing.

Edit: typo

News media like NYT, Fox etc are tools for high scale brainwashing public by the elite. This is why you see all the News papers have some political ideology. If they were reporting on truth and not opinions they won't have the need for leaning. Also you never see the journalists reporting against their own publication.

Humanity is better off without these mass brainwashing systems.

Millions of independent journalists will be better outcome for humanity.

They'd probably have a different business model, like selling clickbait articles written by AI with sex and controversy galore.

I'm not saying AI is better for journalism than NYT reporters, just that it's more important.

Journalism has been in trouble for decades, sadly -- and I say that as a journalism minor in college. Trump gave the papers a brief respite, but the industry continues to die off, consolidate, etc. We probably need a different business model altogether. My vote is just for public funding with independent watchdogs, i.e. states give counties money to operate newspapers with citizen watchdog groups/boards. Maaaaybe there's room for "premium" niche news like 404 Media/The Information/Foreign Affairs/National Review/etc., but that remains to be seen. If the NYT paywall doesn't keep them alive, I doubt this lawsuit will.

Trying to prohibit this usage of information would not help prevent centralization of power and profit.

All it would do is momentarily slow AI progress (which is fine), and allow OpenAI et al to pull the ladder up behind them (which fuels centralization of power and profit).

By what mechanism do you think your desired outcome would prevent centralization of profit to the players who are already the largest?

So you want all the profit to be sucked up by the three companies that can afford to make deals with rights holders to slurp up all their content?

Making the process for training AI require an army of lawyers and industry connections will have the opposite effect than you intend.

I'm not sure whether that would even be a net loss, TBH. So much commercial media is crap, maybe it would be better for the profit motive to be removed? On the fiction side, there's plenty of fan-fic and indie productions. On the nonfiction side, many indie creators produce better content these days than the big media outlets do. And there still might be room for premium investigative stories done either by a few consolidated wire outlets (Reuters/APNews) or niche publishers (The Information, 404 Media, etc.).

And then there's all the run-of-the-mill small-town journalism that AI would probably be even better at than human reporters: all the sports stories, the city council meetings, the environmental reviews...

If AI makes commercial content publishing unviable, that might actually cut down on all the SEO spam and make the internet smaller and more local again, which would be a good thing IMO.

Great. I will start a company to generate training data then. I will hire all those journalists. I won't make the content public. Instead I will charge OpenAI/Tesla/Anthropic millions of dollars to give them access to the content.

Can I apply for YC with this idea?

They're not. They can skip the entirety of the NYT archives and not much of value will be lost. The issue is with every copycat lawsuit that sues every AI company out of existence. It's a chilling effect on AI development. Old entrenched companies trying to prohibit new ways of learning and sharing information for the sake of their profit.

The NYT has been dying a slow death since long before ChatGPT came along.

How does AI compete with journalism? AI doesn't do investigative reporting, AI can't even observe the world or send out reporters.

Which part of journalism is AI going to impact most? Opinion pieces that contain no new information? Summarizing past events?

Why using authored NYT articles is “stupid IP battles”

When an AI uses information from an article it's no difference from me doing it in a blog post. If I'm just summarizing or referencing it, that's fair use, since that's my 'take' on the content.

having to pay for the trained model with them is not stupid?

Because you can charge for anything you want. I can also charge for my summaries of NYT articles.

Just pick the top 12 articles/publishers out of a month of Google News, doesn't really matter. Most readers probably can't tell them apart anyway.

Yes, all those outlets will suffer the same harms. They have been for decades. That's why there's so few remaining. Most are consolidated and produce worthless drivel now. Their business model doesn't really work in the modern era.

Thankfully, people have and will continue to produce content even if much of it gets stolen -- as has happened for decades, if not millennia, before AI.

If anything what we need is a better way to fund human creative endeavors not dependent on pay-per-view. That's got nothing to do with AI; AI just speeds up a process of decay that has been going on forever.

Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP.

This is also related to earlier studies about OpenAI where their models have a bad habit of just regurgitating training data verbatim. If your trained data is protected IP you didn’t secure the rights for then that’s a real big problem. Hence this lawsuit. If successful, the floodgates will open.

It's likely fair use.

I agree. You can even listen to the NYT Hard Fork podcast (that I recommend btw https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/podcasts/hard-fork-execut...) where they recently had Harvard copyright law professor Rebecca Tushnet on as a guest.

They asked her about the issue of copyrighted training data. Her response was:

""" Google, for example, with the book project, doesn’t give you the full text and is very careful about not giving you the full text. And the court said that the snippet production, which helps people figure out what the book is about but doesn’t substitute for the book, is a fair use.

So the idea of ingesting large amounts of existing works, and then doing something new with them, I think, is reasonably well established. The question is, of course, whether we think that there’s something uniquely different about LLMs that justifies treating them differently. """

Now for my take: Proving that OpenAI trained on NYT articles is not sufficient IMO. They would need to prove that OpenAI is providing a substitutable good via verbatim copying, which I don't think you can easily prove. It takes a lot of prompt engineering and luck to pull out any verbatim articles. It's well-established that LLMs screw up even well-known facts. It's quite hard to accurately pull out the training data verbatim.

It's likely not. Search for "the four factors of fair use". While I think OpenAI will have decent arguments for 3 of the factors, they'll get killed on the fourth factor, "the effect of the use on the potential market", which is what this lawsuit is really about.

If your "fair use" substantially negatively affects the market for the original source material, which I think is fairly clear in this case, the courts wont look favorably on that.

Of course, I think this is a great test case precisely because the power of "Internet scale" and generative AI is fundamentally different than our previous notions about why we wanted a "fair use exception" in the first place.

I think we need a lot of clarity here. I think it's perfectly sensible to look at gigantic corpuses of high quality literature as being something society would want to be fair use for training an LLM to better understand and produce more correct writing... but the actual information contained in NYT articles should probably be controlled primarily by NYT. If the value a business delivers (in this case the information of the articles) can be freely poached without limitation by competitors then that business can't afford to actually invest in delivering a quality product.

As a counter argument it might be reasonable to instead say that the NYT delivers "current information" so perhaps it'd be fair to train your model on articles so long as they aren't too recent... but I think a lot of the information that the NYT now relies on for actual traffic is their non-temporal stuff - including things like life advice and recipes.

What if a court interprets fair use as a human-only right, just like it did for copyright?

It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML.

It matters what is legal and what makes sense.

open source won't care. they'll just use data anyway.

closed/proprietary services that also monetize - there's a question whether it's "fair" to take and use data for free, and then basically resell access to it. the monetization aspect is the bigger rub than just data use.

(maybe it's worth noting again that "openai" is not really "open" and not the same as open source ai/ml.)

taking data, maybe it's data that's free to take, and then as freely distributing resulting work, that's really just fine. taking something for free (without distinction, maybe it's free, maybe it's supposed to stay free, maybe it's not supposed to be used like that, maybe it's copyrighted), and then just ignoring licenses/relicensing and monetizing without care, that's just a minefield.

You can train your own model no problem, but you arguably can’t publish it. So yes, the model can’t be open-sourced, but the training procedure can.

I think not, because stealing large amounts of unlicensed content and hoping momentum/bluster/secrecy protects you is a privilege afforded only to corporations.

OSS seems to be developing its own, transparent, datasets.

Why isn't robots.txt enough to enforce copyright etc? If NYT didn't set robots.txt properly, is their content free-for-all? Yes I know the first answer you would jump to is "of course not, copyright is the default", but it's almost 2024 and we have had robots.txt as industry de jure to stop crawling.

We all remember when Aaron Swartz got hit with a wire tapping and intent to distribute federal crime for downloading JSTR stuff right?

It's really disgusting, IMO, that corporations that go above and beyond that sort of behavior are seeing NO federal investigations for this sort of behavior. Yet a private citizen does it and it's threats of life in prison.

This isn't new, but it speaks to a major hole in our legal system and the administration of it. The Feds are more than willing to steamroll an individual but will think twice over investigating a large corporation engaged in the same behavior.

Would be fascinated to hear from someone inside on a throwaway, but my nearest experience is that corporate lawyers aren't stupid.

If there's legally-murky secret data sauce, it's firewalled from being easily seen in its entirety by anyone not golden-handcuffed to the company.

They may be able to train against it. They may be able to peek at portions of it. But no one is downloading-all.

for what it's worth, i asked altman directly and he denied using libgen or books2, but also deferred to murati and her team on specifics. but the Q&A wasn't recorded and they haven't answered my follow-ups.

ChatGPTs birth as a research preview may have been an attempt to avoid these issues. It would have been unlikely to trigger legal anger for a free product which few use. When usage exploded, the natural inclination would be to hope for the best.

Google may simply have been obliged to follow suit.

Personally, I’m looking forward to pirate LLMs trained on academic content.

didnt they just get caught for pantent infrigment? I'm sure they've done their fair share of shady stuff with the AI datasets too, they are just going to do a stellar job of conciling it.

it is in the legal complaint - they have ten examples of direct content. I think they got very skilled people to work on producing the evidence.

The complaint has specific examples they got from ChatGPT.

There is a precedent: There were some exploit prompts that could be used to get ChatGPT to emit random training set data. It would emit repeated words or gibberish that then spontaneously converged on to snippets of training data.

OpenAI quickly worked to patch those and, presumably, invested energy into preventing it from emitting verbatim training data.

It wasn’t as simple as asking it to emit verbatim articles, IIRC. It was more about it accidentally emitting segments of training data for specific sequences that were semi rare enough.

They could have changed it to not do this after getting sued.

Maybe she needs to sue Goodreads too. It's most likely a way for her to claw relevance for her unmarketed book by attaching "AI" to it and also "poor artist" to her work.

Try selling subscriptions to your print-outs.

Well imagine you sell a printer with internal memory loaded with NYT content

In the EU, countries can (and do) impose levies on printers and scanners because they may be used to copy copyrighted material (https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2013/07/12/eu-member-states...). Similar levies exist for blank CDs, USB sticks, MP3 players etc. In the US, this applies to "blank CDs and personal audio devices, media centers, satellite radio devices, and car audio systems that have recording capabilities." (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy)

Critically the question is, did the developers put reasonable guardrails in place to prevent it?

Why? If I steal a bunch of unique works of art and store them in my house for only me to see, am I still committing a crime?

If a person with a very good memory reads an article, they only violate copyright if they write it out and share it, or perform the work publicly. If they have a reasonable understanding of the law they won't do so. However a malicious person could absolutely trick or force them to produce the copyrighted work. The blame in that case however is not on the person who read and recited the article but on the person who tricked them.

Is that really true? Also, what if the second person is not malicious? In the example of ChatGPT, the user may accidentally write a prompt that causes the model to recite copyrighted text. I don't think a judge will look at this through the same lens as you are.

I'm not sure if the verbatim content isn't more of a "stopped clock is right twice a day" or "monkeys typewriting shakespeare" situation.

I think it’s more nuanced than that.

Extending the “monkeys on typewriters” example, it would be like training and evolving those monkeys using Shakespeare as the training target.

Eventually they will evolve to write content more Shakespeare like. If they get so close to the target that some of them start reciting the Shakespeare they were trained on, you can’t really claim it was random.

I don't understand this argument. You seem to be implying that I could freely copy and distribute other people's works without commiting copyright infringement as long as I make the resulting product somehow less compelling than the original? (Maybe I print it in a hard-to-read typeface or smear some feces on the copy.)

I have seen low fidelity copies of motion pictures recorded by a handheld camera in a theater that I'm pretty sure most would qualify as infringing. The copied product is no doubt inferior, but still competes on price and convenience.

If someone does not wish to pay to read the New York Times then perhaps accepting the risk of non-perfect copies made by a LLM is an acceptable trade off for them to save a dime.

It doesn't refuse. See this comment containing examples from the complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38782668

"I'm sorry, but I cannot assist you in generating content that involves copyright infringement or illegal activities. If you have other questions or need assistance with a different topic, please feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help in any way I can."

They want their cake and to eat it too. They want potential new subscribers to be able to see content not pay-walled based on reference. But how dare a new player not o. Their list of approved referrers benefit from that content.

How do we know that ChatGPT isn’t a potential subscriber?

-mic

FWIW When I was taking journalism classes, style was not amorphous.

We had an entire book (400+ pages) which detailed every single specific stylistic rule we had to follow for our class. Had the same thing in high school newspaper.

I can only assume that NYT has an internal one as well.

We don’t, and shouldn’t, give LLMs the same rights as people.

Do people ever get tired of this argument that relies on anthropomorphizing these AI black boxes?

A computer isn't a human, and we already have laws that have a different effect depending on if it's a computer doing it or a human. LLMs are no different, no matter how catchy hyping them up as being == Humans may be.

The reproduction of that material in an educational setting is protected by Fair Use.

“Teh al al m is just leik a people. Check and mate.”

If Tesla thinks their competitors have violated any of their parents they are well within their rights to seek damages...

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

If they used copyrighted material or trademarks, they almost certainly _did_ pay the Goonies property rightholders and Stephen King for the privilege. Why would you think they didn't?

Copyright Is Brain Damage by Nina Paley [1] claimed that culture is like a bunch of neurons passing and evolving data to each other, and copyright is like severing the ties between the neurons, like brain damage. It also presented [2] an alternative way of viewing art and science, as products of the common culture, not a product purely from the creator, to be privatised. This sounds really relevant to your comment.

Furthermore, if we manage to "untrain" AI on certain pieces of content, then copyright would really become "brain" damage too. Like, the perceptrons and stuff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc

[2] No, I'm not an AI, just autistic.

I don't understand. So if New York times reported on a new laws of physics and put as an article will became copyrighted? Nobody would be able to talk about it and has to discover it by themselves?

How is reporting on an event different from reporting on discovering a scientific law?

Yes. Journalism is a job. People do the work of turning these happenings into words, and are paid for it. That's what's stolen here. The value created through doing that work.

If it didn't have value, Microsoft would lose nothing by no longer ingesting it.

Okay. But ChatGPT doesn't spin out the fact in the same order right? So how does this stand in court?

Yeah. I don't think it makes much sense to allow copyright on textual descriptions of events that happened.

Now the question is whether did OpenAI violate the terms of service by using the bits transferred from NYT to train their LLM. I don't think their TOS had LLMs mentioned. So it's on NYT to be negligent and not update their TOS right?

... for profit.

for non-profit

It was fed NYT's content so it would know how to reproduce similar content, for profit.

Sounds like journalism school?

Sections of this statement absolutely parrot back NYTimes article text vebatim depending how you look at it. What's the line? 3 sequential verbatim words? 5? 8?

closely summarizes it

Absolutely not copyright infringement

mimics its expressive style

Absolutely not copyright infringement

can generate output that recites Times content verbatim

This one seems the closest to infringement, but still doesn't seem like infringement. A printer has this capability too. If a user told ChatGPT to recite NYT content and then sold that content, that would be 100% infringement, but would probably be on the user, not the tool. e.g. if someone printed out NYT articles and sold them, nobody would come after the printer manufacturer.

undermine[s] and damage[s]” the Times’ relationship with readers, the outlet alleges, while also depriving it of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.

This claim seems far fetched as the point of the NYT is to report the news. One thing that LLMs absolutely cannot do is report today's news. I can see no way that ChatGPT is a substitute for the NYT in a way that violates copyright.

You could definitely argue that it's more than just reading since they made the model out of it. But the matrix of parameters generated by training is so fundamentally different than the input that it is certainly covered by the transformative use exception to copyright.

Of course, OpenAI doesn't just read. But do they simply reproduce content verbatim? And when they do not reproduce contents of the NYT verbatim, but rather process and tailor them to the situation, mixed, 'charged' with new 'information content' and adjusted to the purpose of the inquirer, it will not be easy for the New York Times.

Because ultimately, our entire knowledge is based on the knowledge of others and is remixed, 'charged' and changed by us after reading. I also think that the New York Times uses the contents of others to create new content.

Sounds like the infinite monkey typewriter thing, where the NYT sieves the OpenAI output for exact segments, probably after primining it to fatten the yield

20% of workloads running on Windows should result in corresponding number of jobs as well but that's not what I see.

Most companies are writing software with software developed on Linux first and for Linux first (or Unix) and later ported to Windows as an after thought. I'm thinking Python, Ruby, NodeJS, Rust, Go, Java, PHP but not seeing as much of C#/ASP.NET which should at least be 20% of the market?

Only two explanations - either I am in a social bubble so don't have exposure or writing software for Windows is so much easy that it takes five times less engineering muscle.

About a fifth to a quarter of public-facing Web servers are Windows Server

Got a link for that? Best I can find is 5% of all websites: https://www.netcraft.com/blog/may-2023-web-server-survey/

LLMs won't die out but proprietary LLMs behind APIs might not have valuations of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Crowd source, crowed trained (distributed training) fast enough, good enough generative models that are updated (and downloadable) every few months would start to erode the subscriber base gradually.

I might be very very wrong here but it seems like so from where I see it.

Wha rid that .mkv was actually a high quality reenactment with different actors and millions of slight differences peppered throughout the story. And if a viewer of the original and a viewer of the .mkv talked about the movie they would agree on most things. But the color of the sunset or the home town name of the main character maybe different?

Except Google forced these companies to use their platform (Google's AMP) to host the content and essentially blackmailed into doing so ("we'll link directly, but only on page 3 of results").

My browser doesn’t display ads and shows little regard for most paywalls. Do I owe NYTimes something?

NYT is an anomaly. The majority of their revenue is actually from subscriptions.

The newsroom is a different part of thr company than the legal department. Plus, sometimes your company does something that's newsworthy! Just like all journalism, there's always implicit bias. No reason to get suspicious about a news organization covering the news.

The NYT also hallucinates from time to time: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/us/correcting-the-record-...

(That's a story about Jayson Blair, one of their reporters who just plain made up stories and sources for months before getting caught)

Edit: Sheesh, even their apology is paywalled. Wiki background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair?wprov=sfla1

One should always source news from a variety of outlets as to attempt to be cognizant of the biases in play and to see the story from many viewpoints.

Would I trust the NYT to be unbiased? No. But is their viewpoint extremely relevant to the subject at hand? Yes.

The ChatGPT subscription is more valuable because it's built on the theft of the NYT content and many other authors' work.

More on-topic: if the NYT thinks that GPT-4 is replicating their style then [as anybody who has tried to do creative writing work can testify to] they need to fire all their writers.

The complaint isn’t that ChatGPT is imitating New York Times style by default.

The complaint is that you can ask it to write “in the style of New York Times” and it will do so.

I don’t know if this argument has any legal merit, but it’s not as simple as you suggest. It’s the textual parallel to having AI image generators mimic the trademark style of artists. We know it can be done, the question is what does it mean legally.

Is your point that the NYT should sue bloggers? Or that given the existence of bloggers, they should not try to sue Microsoft? Or something else?

All those blogs are _also_ violating copyright, so I don't see the irony? One doesn't spend a million dollars suing a defendant with pennies to their name.

I'd also expect the Times style complaint to have merit because it's probably much easier for ChatGPT to imitate the NYT style than an arbitrary style.

I'm pretty sure the defense is the "NYT Style and Usage Guide"...

(2023 - 1851) * 365 * 200 = 12,556,000

Yep, so a few million ripped off articles is plausible.

Copyright in the US persists for 70 years after the publisher's death.

So the earliest available copyrighted material would be all content published by anybody who died in the year 1953 or earlier.

If the author of an article published in 1950 still has a living author, the work is still copyrighted.

The first 75+ years are no longer in copyright, so certainly possible to train on thousands maybe millions of NYT articles without concern.

The vast majority of quality art and is produced by people who do it because they want to create art, not for money, and most artists earn little.

There is no theft. Hyperbole won't get you taken seriously, use correct terminology.

it's not theft

    Copying is not theft.
    Stealing a thing leaves one less left
    Copying it makes one thing more;
    that’s what copying’s for.

The court decided to focus on the tiny snippets Google displayed rather than the full text on their servers backing the search functionality. The court found significant that Google deliberately limited the snippet view so it couldn't be used as a replacement for purchasing the original book. The opinion is a relatively easy read, I highly recommend it if you're interested in the issue. It's also notable the court commented that the Google case was right on the edge of fair use.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/13...

which laws are broken exactly? it's not remotely settled law that "training an NN = copyright infringement"

I am not saying that NYT will win, but I think it is more likely to win because it has many more supporters (including politicians, judges) than developers do.

Opioids.

The Sackler family owned Purdue Pharma, which created OxyContin and heavily marketed the drug. Many Americans see the family as partially responsible for kickstarting the opioid epidemic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

The family has been largely successful at avoiding any personal liability in Purdue’s litigations. Many people feel the settlements of the Purdue lawsuits were too lenient. One of the key perceived aspects of the final settlements was that there was too many victims of the opioid epidemic for the courts to handle and attempt to make whole.

Agree. My view is we’re in the Napster moment and someone is going to invent the iTunes Music Store. Language models are a distribution mechanism for knowledge content—- in many cases more efficient and useful than the originally packaged materials (akin to how downloading a single pop song is greater than buying the album). It feels clear this is where we’re headed (verified, compensated content delivered through a new mechanism); this lawsuit is like the RIAA v. music sharing and the question is just if the current players in AI make it through or if someone else will come in and do iTunes.

The output is still there for anyone else to train on if they want.

Legal arguments aside, the goldrush era of data scraping is over. Major sources of content like Reddit and Twitter have killed APIs, added defenses and updated EULAs to avoid being pillaged again. More and more sites are moving content behind paywalls.

There's also the small issue of having 10s of millions of VC dollars to rent/buy hundreds of high end GPUs. OpenAI and friends are also trying their hardest to prevent others doing so via 'Skynet' hysteria driven regulatory capture.

George R. R. Martin authored A Game of Thrones, but lost in-court against Google when Google Books reproduced parts of his text verbatim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

No piracy or even AI was required, here. Google's defense was that their product couldn't reproduce the book in it's entirety, which was proven and made the prosecution about Fair Use instead. Given that it was much harder to prosecute on those grounds, Google tried coercing the authors into a settlement before eventually the District Court dropped the case in Google's favor altogether.

OpenAI's lawyers are aware of the precedent on copyright law. They're going to argue their application is Fair Use, and they might get away with it.

Don't forget that (almost assuredly) some percentage of HN comments are made by these very LLMs in question!!

The copyright laws are unjust to begin with. Copyright shouldn’t last beyond ten years anyway. Simply claiming that piracy is always bad ignores the evil of the laws in the first place.

Who's stopping their nyt articles in favor of chatGPT? Nobody stopped watching movies when their lines are in the lyrics of songs.

It's "theirs"? The copyright monopoly was created to advance art and science, anything else is a mere perversion. So who are in the moral right, those advancing science by developing humanity's literal pinnacle of science, artficial intelligence, or those trying to hold the development back for their own commercial interest?

Mind you, Google books, literally just text from copyrighted books published for everyone online, was ruled "fair use", due to it's benefit to humanity.

Except Gmail does not own the copyrights to the email. So in the context to this article and theme of the post, the owner of the data is king. I don’t think any court would rule Google owned a novel sent over Gmail, little alone the contents of more normative emails.

FB likewise.

Or the filter could be the other way, failing to litigate an AI to decelerate it's progress, and a risk of augmenting the underlying society too much too quickly.

an AI that would otherwise save humanity.

Just to clarify, this is sarcasm right?

How are the LLMs rent seeking? they are clearly providing value that people want to pay for..

The whole idea of "a dying media" is pretty scary to me. It indicates that some people place no value in journalism. To be fair, there are a huge number of newspapers who also place little to no value in journalism. I have a number of local papers who will report on celebrity gossip, but it's all auto-translate from somewhere and just posted without questioning, so you end up with random "news" about a person who is completely unknown in the country.

Real, and especially investigative, journalism is extremely expensive and it's not something modern AI is even remotely capable to doing. It might be able to help and make it cheaper, but you can't replace newspapers with ChatGPT and expect to get anything but random gossip and rehashed press releases. I do wonder why the New York Times believe you can.

All you're doing is repeating the fact. OP's point was, bluntly, "the situation is dumb".

I happen to agree on that one. What is the benefit of copyrighting the Eiffel Tower? The purpose of copyright is not to say you can always make money off of what you created. It is to incentivize the creation of new things by allowing you to exclusively make money off of it for a while before its benefits can go to broader society.

So what is the purpose of copyrighting the Eiffel tower? Would it not have been made if copyright wasn't in place? (obviously it would have because it was and the law wasn't in place yet). Second the claim is that the copyright is on the "lighting design" visible at night. Is the lighting design of the tower so unique that no-one else could come up with it? or is the lighting design necessitated by the structure of the tower itself?

I'd say given the structure of the tower which restricts the lights, there is nothing sufficiently remotely unique or different to warrant copyright of the lighting design. Almost any design on that tower would look about the same.

So how is society benefiting from copyrighting that lighting design?

Exclusivity deals are almost always a net loss for society. Which is why whenever you see one you should be questioning if it should be in place. Exclusive contracts are anti free-market. Now there are absolutely valid places where they are justified and should be in place - but they should be questioned by default.

Your comment covers lots of interesting topics. Talking only about chatGPT+Bing's threat to press and content creators survival, the difference with WordPress is that you could generate revenue "on your own" through your audience. Either with ads or through subscription. Conversational search will only make people visit less websites and consume the content directly from the AI. And sometimes without attribution to the original source, meaning your chances to monetize, as the creator/journalist/publisher, fall down to zero.