cross-posted from: https://nom.mom/post/121481
OpenAI could be fined up to $150,000 for each piece of infringing content.https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/report-potential-nyt-lawsuit-could-force-openai-to-wipe-chatgpt-and-start-over/#comments
What’s the basis for this? Why can a human read a thing and base their knowledge on it, but not a machine?
Because a human understands and transforms the work. The machine runs statistical analysis and regurgitates a mix of what it was given. There’s no understanding or transformation, it’s just what is statistically the 3rd most correct word that comes next. Humans add to the work, LLMs don’t.
Machines do not learn. LLMs do not “know” anything. They make guesses based on their inputs. The reason they appear to be so right is the scale of data they’re trained on.
This is going to become a crazy copyright battle that will likely lead to the entirety of copyright law being rewritten.
I don’t know if I agree with everything you wrote but I think the argument about llms basically transforming the text is important.
Converting written text into numbers doesn’t fundamentally change the text. It’s still the authors original work, just translated into a vector format. Reproduction of that vector format is still reproduction without citation.
It’s also the scale of their context, not just the data. More (good) data and lots of (good) varied data is obviously better, but the perceived cleverness isn’t owed to data alone.
I do hope copyright law gets rewritten. It is dated and hasn’t kept up with society or technology at all.
I think this is very unlikely. All of law is precedent.
Google uses copyrighted works for many things that are “algorithmic” but not AI and people aren’t shitting themselves over it.
Why would AI be different? So long as copyright isn’t infringed at least.
That machine is a commercial product. Quite unlike a human being, in essence, purpose and function. So I do not think the comparison is valid here unless it were perhaps a sentient artificial being, free to act of its own accord. But that is not what we’re talking about here. We must not be carried away by our imaginations, these language models are (often proprietary and for profit) products.
I don’t see how that’s relevant. A company can pay someone to read copyrighted work, learn from it, and then perform a task for the benefit of the company related to the learning.
But how did that person acquire the copyrighted work? Was the copyrighted material paid for?
That’s the crux of the issue, Open AI isn’t paying for the copyrighted work they are “reading”, are they?
What does paying for anything have to do with what we’re talking about here. They’re ingesting freely available content, that anyone with a web browser could read