Technology

I will repeat what I have proffered before:

If OpenAI stated that it is impossible to train leading AI models without using copyrighted material, then, unpopular as it may be, the preemptive pragmatic solution should be pretty obvious, enter into commercial arrangements for access to said copyrighted material.

Claiming a failure to do so in circumstances where the subsequent commercial product directly competes in a market seems disingenuous at best, given what I assume is the purpose of copyrighted material, that being to set the terms under which public facing material can be used. Particularly if regurgitation of copyrighted material seems to exist in products inadequately developed to prevent such a simple and foreseeable situation.

Yes I am aware of the USA concept of fair use, but the test of that should be manifestly reciprocal, for example would Meta allow what it did to MySpace, hack and allow easy user transfer, or Google with scraping Youtube.

To me it seems Big Tech wants its cake and to eat it, where investor $$$ are used to corrupt open markets and undermine both fundamental democratic State social institutions, manipulate legal processes, and undermine basic consumer rights.

The problem is not the use of copyrighted material. The problem is doing so without permission and without paying for it.

Some relevant comments from Ars:

leighno5

The absolute hubris required for OpenAI here to come right out and say, 'Yeah, we have no choice but to build our product off the exploitation of the work others have already performed' is stunning. It's about as perfect a representation of the tech bro mindset that there can ever be. They didn't even try to approach content creators in order to do this, they just took what they needed because they wanted to. I really don't think it's hyperbolic to compare this to modern day colonization, or worker exploitation. 'You've been working pretty hard for a very long time to create and host content, pay for the development of that content, and build your business off of that, but we need it to make money for this thing we're building, so we're just going to fucking take it and do what we need to do.'

The entitlement is just...it's incredible.

4qu4rius

20 years ago, high school kids were sued for millions & years in jail for downloading a single Metalica album (if I remember correctly minimum damage in the US was something like 500k$ per song).

All of a sudden, just because they are the dominant ones doing the infringment, they should be allowed to scrap the entire (digital) human knowledge ? Funny (or not) how the law always benefits the rich.

https://petapixel.com/2024/01/03/court-docs-reveal-midjourney-wanted-to-copy-the-style-of-these-photographers/

What's stopping AI companies from paying royalties to artists they ripped off?

Also, lol at accounts created within few hours just to reply in this thread.

The moment their works are the one that got stolen by big companies and driven out of business, watch their tune change.

Edit: I remember when Reddit did that shitshow, and all the sudden a lot of sock / bot accounts appeared. I wasn't expecting it to happen here, but I guess election cycle is near.

1. This is not REALLY about copyright - this is an attack on free and open AI models, which would be IMPOSSIBLE if copyright was extended to cover the case of using the works for training.
2. It's not stealing. There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model. IP rights have been continuously strengthened due to lobbying over the last century and are already absurdly strong, I don't understand why people on here want so much to strengthen them ever further.

It's crazy how everyone is suddenly in favour of IP law.

Well in that case maybe chat gpt should just fuck off it doesn’t seem to be doing anything particularly useful, and now it’s creator has admitted it doesn’t work without stealing things to feed it. Un fucking believable. Hacks gonna hack I guess.

Having read through these comments, I wonder if we've reached the logical conclusion of copyright itself.

...so stop doing it!

This explains what Valve was until recently not so cavalier about AI: They didn't want to hold the bag on copyright matters outside of their domain.

Alas, AI critics jumped onto the conclusion this one time. Read this:

Further, OpenAI writes that limiting training data to public domain books and drawings "created more than a century ago" would not provide AI systems that "meet the needs of today's citizens."

It's a plain fact. It does not say we have to train AI without paying.

To give you a context, virtually everything on the web is copyrighted, from reddit comments to blog articles to open source software. Even open data usually come with copyright notice. Open research articles also.

If misled politicians write a law banning the use of copyrighted materials, that'll kill all AI developments in the democratic countries. What will happen is that AI development will be led by dictatorships, and that's absolutely a disaster even for the critics. Think about it. Do we really want Xi, Putin, Netanyahu and Bin Salman to control all the next-gen AIs powering their cyber warfare while the West has to fight them with Siri and Alexa?

So, I agree that, at the end of the day, we'd have to ask how much rule-abiding AI companies should pay for copyrighted materials, and that'd be less than the copyright holders would want. (And I think it's sad.)

However, you can't equate these particular statements in this article to a declaration of fuck-copyright. Tbh Ars Technica disappointed me this time.

Then shutdown your goddamn company until you find a better way.

I stand by my opinion that AI will be the worst thing humans ever created, and that means it ranks just a bit above religion.

I think viral outrage aside, there is a very open question about what constitutes fair use in this application. And I think the viral outrage misunderstands the consequences of enforcing the notion that you can't use openly scrapable online data to build ML models.

Effectively what the copyright argument does here is make it so that ML models are only legally allowed to make by Meta, Google, Microsoft and maybe a couple of other companies. OpenAI can say whatever, I'm not concerned about them, but I am concerned about open source alternatives getting priced out of that market. I am also concerned about what it does to previously available APIs, as we've seen with Twitter and Reddit.

I get that it's fashionable to hate on these things, and it's fashionable to repeat the bit of misinformation about models being a copy or a collage of training data, but there are ramifications here people aren't talking about and I fear we're going to the worst possible future on this, where AI models are effectively ubiquitous but legally limited to major data brokers who added clauses to own AI training rights from their billions of users.

Or, or, or, hear me out:

Maybe their particular approach to making an AI is flawed.

Its like people do not know that there are many different kinds of ways that attempt to do AI.

Many of them do not rely on basically a training set that is the cumulative sum of all human generated content of every imaginable kind.

If it is impossible, either shut down operations or find a way to pay for it.

Wait, so if the way I make money is illegal now, it's the system's fault, isn't it? That means I can keep going because I believe I'm justified, right? Right?

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Then pay for the material like everyone else who can't do things without someone else's copyrighted materials.

There's not a musician that havent heard other songs before. Not a painter that haven't seen other painting. No comedian that haven't heard jokes. No writer that haven't read books.

AI haters are not applying the same standards to humans that they do to generative AI. Obviously this is not to say that AI can't plagiarize. If it's spitting out sentences that are direct quotes from an article someone wrote before and doesn't disclose the source then yeah that is an issue. There's however a limit after which the output differs enough from the input that you can't claim it's stealing even if perfectly mimics the style of someone else.

Just because DallE creates pictures that have getty images watermark on them it doesn't mean the picture itself is a direct copy from their database. If anything it's the use of the logo that's the issue. Not the picture.

Of course it is. About 50 years ago we went to a regime where everything is copywrited rather then just things that were marked and registered. Not sure where.I stand on that. One could argue we are in a crazy over copyright era now anyway.

Could they be legally required to open source the llm? I believe them, but that doesn’t make it right