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.
Comment on OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
V1K1N6@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
Machines aren’t people and it’s fine and reasonable to have different standards for each.
LWD@lemm.ee 5 months ago
LLMs cannot learn or create like humans, and even if they somehow could, they are not humans. So the comparison to human creators expounding upon a genre is false because the premises on which it is based are false.
Perhaps you could compare it to a student getting blackout drunk, copying Wikipedia articles and pasting them together, using a thesaurus app to change a few words here and there… And in the end, the student doesn’t know what they created, has no recollection of the sources they used, and the teacher can’t detect whether it’s plagiarized or who from.
OpenAI made a mistake by taking data without consent, not just from big companies but from individuals who are too small to fight back. Regurgitating information without attribution is gross in every regard, because even if you don’t believe in asking for consent before taking from someone else, you should probably ask for a source before using this regurgitated information.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 months 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.ee 5 months 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.”
LWD@lemm.ee 5 months 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.”
GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network 5 months ago
Lemmy in general loves to steal IP, no shock this post didn’t get the love it deserved
General_Effort@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
What about the case where you’re tracing a comic to learn how to draw with the intent of using the new skills to compete with who you learned from?
Point of the question being, they’re not processing the images to make exact duplicates like tracing would.
It’s significantly closer to copying a style, which you can’t own.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 months ago
It doesn’t matter how it “”learns””
CrayonRosary@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 5 months ago
But you don't understand, he wants it to be true!
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
000@fuck.markets 5 months ago
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.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.
tinwhiskers@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
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.
tinwhiskers@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
SheeEttin@programming.dev 5 months ago
copyright only protects them from people republishing their content
This is not correct. Copyright protects reproduction, derivation, distribution, performance, and display of a work.
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.
Yes, you can legally make derivative works, but without license, it has to be fair use. In this case, where not only did they use one whole work in its entirety, they likely scraped thousands of whole NYT articles.
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.
This isn’t necessarily correct either. I assume they sell access to their archives, for research or whatever. Being able to retrieve articles verbatim through chatgpt does harm their business.
Bogasse@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
And I suppose people at OpenAI understand how to build a formal proof and that it is one. So it’s straight up dishonest.
blargerer@kbin.social 5 months ago
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.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
I am not familiar with any judicative system. It sounds to me that OpenAI wants to get the evidence the NYT collected beforehand.