OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles
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.
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.
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.
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.
All NYT needed to do was show OpenAI how they go the AI to output that content, and I'd expect OpenAI to proactively find a solution. I don't think the courts will look kindly on NYT's refusal to collaborate and find some way to resolve this without a lawsuit. A friend of mine tried to settle a case once, but the other side refused and it went all the way to court. The court found that my friend had been in the wrong (as he freely admitted all along) but also made them pay my friend compensation for legal costs (including just time spent gathering evidence). In the end, my friend got the outcome he was hoping for and the guy who "won" the lawsuit lost close to a million dollars.
They might look down upon that but I doubt they’ll rule against NYT entirely. The AI isn’t a separate agent from OpenAI either. If the AI infringes on copyright, then so does OpenAI.
Copyright applies to reproduction of a work so if they build any machine that is capable of doing that (they did) then they are liable for it.
Seems like the solution here is to train data to not output copyrighted works and to maybe train a sub-system to detect it and stop the main chatbot from responding with it.
That is for sure not the case. The modern world is bursting with machines capable of reproducing copyrighted works, and their manufacturers are not liable for copyright violations carried out by users of those machines. You're using at least once of those machines to read this comment. This stuff was decided around the time VCRs were invented.
Sorry, the unlicensed reproduction of those works via machine. Missed a word but it’s important. Most machines do not reproduce works in unlicensed ways, especially not by themselves. Then we talk users. Yes, if a user utilizes a machine to reproduce a work, it’s on the user. However, the machine doesn’t usually produce the copyrighted work itself because that production is illegal. For VCR, it’s fine to make a tv recorder because the VCR itself doesn’t violate copyright, the user does via its inputs. If the NYT input its own material and then received it, obviously fine. If it didn’t though, that’s illegal reproduction.
So here I expect the court will say that OpenAI has no right to reproduce the work in full or in amounts not covered by fair use and must take measures to prevent the reproduction of irrelevant portions of articles. However, they’ll likely be able to train their AI off of publicly available data so long as they don’t violate anyone’s TOS.
I am not familiar with any judicative system. It sounds to me that OpenAI wants to get the evidence the NYT collected beforehand.
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 (yet).
True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.
For that to work, NYT has to prove OpenAI is copying their words verbatim, not just their style.
If the AI isn't outputting a string of words that can be found on an NYT article, they don't stand a chance
Tell me you haven't actually read legal opinions on the subject without telling me...
I'm not aware of any federal case law on copyright and AI. Happy to read some if you have a suggestion.
Case law hasn't been defined yet, but lawyers who have litigated copyright or worked at the office have written on the topic:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU03/20230517/115951/HHRG-118-JU03-Wstate-DamleS-20230517.pdf
That's quite the claim to make so boldly. How about you prove it? Or maybe stop asserting things you aren't certain about.
But you don't understand, he wants it to be true!
17 USC § 106, exclusive rights in copyrighted works:
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.
Training on copyrighted data should be allowed as long as it's something publicly posted.
Only if the end result of that training is also something public. OpenAI shouldn't be making money on anything except ads if they're using copyright material without paying for it.
I was trained on copyrighted material... I guess I should work for free
Why an exception for ads if you're going that route? Wouldn't advertisers deserve the same protections as other creatives?
Personally, since they're not making copies of the input (beyond what's transiently required for processing), and they're not distributing copies, I'm not sure why copyright would come into play.
And I suppose people at OpenAI understand how to build a formal proof and that it is one. So it's straight up dishonest.
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.
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.
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.
This is not correct. Copyright protects reproduction, derivation, distribution, performance, and display of a work.
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 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.
Scraping is the same as reading, not reproducing. That isn't a copyright violation.