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.

  • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    195·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • LWD@lemm.eeEnglish
      12·
      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.”

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        41·
        1 year ago

        I don’t think it’s a question of saying they’re “asking for it”, that just feels like trying to attach an emotionally charged crime to a civil copyright question.
        The technology was designed to transmit the data to a computer for ephemeral processing, and that’s how it’s being used.
        It was intended to be used for human consumption, but their intent has little to do with if what was done was it was fair.
        If you give something away with the hopes people will pay for more, and instead people take what you gave them under the exact terms you specified, it’s not fair to sue them.

        The NYT is perfectly content to have their content used for algorithmic consumption in other cases where people want a consistently formatted, grammatically correct source of information about current events.

        The question of if it’s okay or not is one that society is still working out. Personally, I don’t see a problem with it. If it’s available to anyone, they can do what they want with it. If you want to control access to it, you need to actually do that by putting up a login or in some way getting people to agree to those stipulations.

        Speaking of overutilizing a thesaurus

        I’m sorry some of my words were too big for you.