> which is make extremely confident,

One of the results the LLM has available to itself is a confidence value. It should, at the very least, provide this along with it's answer. Perhaps if it did people would stop calling it 'AI'.'

ChatGPT Search provides this, by the way, though it relies a lot on the quality of Bing search results. Consensus.app does this but for research papers, and has been very useful to me.

If you're going to retrain your model because of this ruling, wouldn't it make sense to remove all DMCA protected content from your training data instead of just the one you were most recently sued for(especially if it sets precedent)

I suppose the cost of legal representation would cancel it out. I can just imagine a class action where anyone who posted on blogger.com between 2002 and 2012 eventually gets a check for 28 dollars.

If I were more optimistic I could imagine a UBI funded by lawsuits against AGI, some combination of lost wages and intellectual property infringement. Can't figure out exactly how much more important an article on The Intercept had on shifting weights than your hacker news comments, might as well just pay everyone equally since we're all equally screwed

No. OpenAI is suspected to be worth over $150B. They can absolutely afford to pay people for data.

Edit: People commenting need to understand that $150B is the discounted value of future revenues. So... yes they can pay out... yes they will be worth less... and yes that's fair to the people who created the information.

I can't believe there are so many apologists on HN for what amounts to vacuuming up peoples data for financial gain.

This type of argument is ignorant, cowardly, shortsighted, and regressive. Both technology and society will progress when we find a formula that is sustainable and incentivizes everyone involved to maximize their contributions without it all blowing up in our faces someday. Copyright law is far from perfect, but it protects artists who want to try and make a living from their work, and it incentivizes creativity that places without such protections usually end up just imitating.

When we find that sustainable framework for AI, China or <insert-boogeyman-here> will just end up imitating it. Idk what harms you're imagining might come from that ("get ahead" is too vague to mean anything), but I just want to point out that that isn't how you become a leader in anything. Even worse, if they are the ones who find that formula first while we take shortcuts to "get ahead", then we will be the ones doing the imitation in the end.

Should we also be concerned that other governments use slave labor (among other human rights violations) and will use that to get ahead?

Isn't it a greater risk that creators lose their income and nobody is creating the content anymore?

Take for instance what has happened with news because of the internet. Not exactly the same, but similar forces at work. It turned into a race to the bottom with everyone trying to generate content as cheaply as possible to get maximum engagement with tech companies siphoning revenue. Expensive, investigative pieces from educated journalists disappeared in favor of stuff that looks like spam. Pre-Internet news was higher quality

Imagine that same effect happening for all content? Art, writing, academic pieces. Its a real risk that openai has peaked in quality

Get ahead in terms of what? Do you believe that the material in public domain or legally available content that doesn't violate copyrights is not enough to research AI/LLMs or is the concern about purely commercial interests?

China also supposedly has abusive labor practices. So, should other countries start relaxing their labor laws to avoid falling behind ?

I'm more concerned that someone people in the tech world are conflating Sam Altman's interest with the national interest.

Absolutely: if copyright is slowing down innovation, we should abolish copyright.

Not just turn a blind eye when it's the right people doing it. They don't even have a legal exemption passed by Congress - they're just straight-up breaking the law and getting away with it. Which is how America works, I suppose.

I read the headline as the copyright violation claim being core to the lawsuit.

Violations of 17 USC 1202 can be punished pretty severely. It's not about just money, either.

If, during the trial, the judge thinks that OpenAI is going to be found to be in violation, he can order all of OpenAIs computer equipment be impounded. If OpenAI is found to be in violation, he can then order permanent destruction of the models and OpenAI would have to start over from scratch in a manner that doesn't violate the law.

Whether you call that "core" or not, OpenAI cannot afford to lose these parts that are left of this lawsuit.

Also, is there really any benefit to stripping author metadata? Was it basically a preprocessing step?

It seems to me that it shouldn't really affect model quality all that much, is it?

Also, in the amended complaint:

> not to notify ChatGPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalists’ copyrights

Wasn't it already quite clear that as long as the articles weren't replicated, it wasn't protected? Or is that still being fought in this case?

In the decision:

> I agree with Defendants. Plai ntiffs allege that ChatGPT has been trained on "a scrape of most of the internet, " Compl. , 29, which includes massive amounts of information from innumerable sources on almost any given subject. Plaintiffs have nowhere alleged that the information in their articles is copyrighted, nor could they do so . When a user inputs a question into ChatGPT, ChatGPT synthesizes the relevant information in its repository into an answer. Given the quantity of information contained in the repository, the likelihood that ChatGPT would output plagiarized content from one of Plaintiffs' articles seems remote. And while Plaintiffs provide third-party statistics indicating that an earlier version of ChatGPT generated responses containing signifi cant amounts of pl agiarized content, Compl. ~ 5, Plaintiffs have not plausibly alleged that there is a " substantial risk" that the current version of ChatGPT will generate a response plagiarizing one of Plaintiffs' articles.

That will probably happen to some extent if not already. However I think people will just stop publishing online if malicious corps like OpenAI are just going to harvest works for their own gain. People publish for personal gain, not to enrich the public or enrich private entities.

There's no point in having third world mechanical turk dens do finishing passes on AI output unless you're trying to make it worse.

Artists are already using AI to photobash images, and writers are using AI to outline and create rough drafts. The point of having a human in the loop is to tell the AI what is worth creating, then recognize where the AI output can be improved. If we have algorithms telling the AI what to make and content mill hacks smearing shit on the output to make it look more human, that would be the worst of both worlds.

The law generally takes a dim view of such attempts to get around things like that. AI biggest defense is claiming they are so beneficial to society that what they are doing is fine.

problem is when a human company profits over their scrape... this isn't a non-profit running out of volunteers & a total distant reality from autonomous robots learning it way by itself

we are discussing an emergent cause that has social & ecological consequences. servers are power hungry stuff that may or not run on a sustainable grid (that also has a bazinga of problems like leaking heavy chemicals on solar panels production, hydro-electric plants destroying their surroundings etc.) & the current state of producing hardware, be a sweatshop or conflict minerals. lets forget creators copyright violation that is written in the law code of almost every existing country and no artist is making billions out of the abuse of their creation right (often they are pretty chill on getting their stuff mentioned, remixed and whatever)

You have to understand, the media companies don't give a shit about the logic, in fact I'm sure a lot of the people pushing the litigation probably see the absurdity of it. This is a business turf war, the stated litigation is whatever excuse they can find to try and go on the offensive against someone they see as a potential threat. The pro copyright group (big media) sees the writing on the wall, that they're about to get dunked on by big tech, and they're thrashing and screaming because $$$.

The problem is, we can't come up with a solution where both parties are happy, because in the end, consumers choose one (getting information from news agencies) or the other (getting information from chatgpt). So, both are fighting for life.

If humanity ever gets to the point where intelligent robots are capable of watching TV like human can, having to adjust copyright laws seems like the least of problems. How about having to adjust almost every law related to basic "human" rights, ownership, being to establish a contract, being responsible for crimes and endless other things.

But for now your washing machine cannot own other things, and you owning a washing machine isn't considered slavery.

Leaving aside the hypothetical "live learning AGI" of the future (given that money is made or lost now), would a human regurgitating content that is not theirs - but presented as if it is - be acceptable to you?

> copyright extremists

It's not copyright "extremism" to expect a level playing field. As long as humans have to adhere to copyright, so should AI companies. If you want to abolish copyright, by all means do, but don't give AI a special exemption.

Exactly. Also core to the copyright extremists’ delusional train of thought is the fact that they don’t seem to understand (or admit) that ingesting, creating a model, and then outputting based on that model is exactly what people do when they observe others’ works and are inspired to create.

A component of fair use is to what degree the derivative work displaces the original. Google's argument has always been that they direct traffic to the original, whereas AI summaries (which Google of course is just as guilty of as openai) completely obsoletes the original publication. The argument now is that the derivative work (LLM model) is transformative, ie, different enough that it doesn't economically compete with the original. I think it's a losing argument but we'll see what the courts arrive at.

In my opinion not a lawyer, Google at least references where they obtained the data and did not regurgitate it as if they were the creators that created something new. obfuscated plagiarism via LLM. Some claim derivative works but I have always seen that as quite a stretch. People here expect me to cite references yet LLM's somehow escape this level of scrutiny.

We don't want to be like China.

Maybe just don't use data from the unhappy magazines you don't care about in the first place?

Yep, the game plan is to keep settling out of court so that (they hope) no legal precedent is set that would effectively make their entire business model illegal. That works until they run out of money I guess, but they probably can't keep it up forever.

Side question, why doesn't other companies get the same attention? Anthropic, xAI and others have deep pockets, and scraped the same data, I'm assuming? It could be a gold mine for all these news agencies to keep settling out of court to make some buck.

This is, in fact, the core value of the hacker ethos. HackerNews.

> The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.

> Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and giving away open-source software. A few go further and assert that all information should be free and any proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU project.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html

Perhaps if the Internet didn't kill copyright, AI will. (Hyperbole)

(Personally my belief is more nuanced than this; I'm fine with very limited copyright, but my belief is closer to yours than the current system we have.)

I think you'll find that most people aren't comfortable with this in practice. They'd like e.g. the state to be able to keep secrets, such as personal information regarding citizens and the stuff foreign spies would like to copy.

You don't have to pre-register copyright in any Berne Convention countries. Your copyright exists from the moment you create something.

(ETA: This paragraph below is diametrically wrong. Sorry.)

AFAIK in the USA, registered copyright is necessary if you want to bring a lawsuit and get more than statutory damages, which are capped low enough that corporations do pre-register work.

Not the case in all Berne countries; you don't need this in the UK for example, but then the payouts are typically a lot lower in the UK. Statutory copyright payouts in the USA can be enough to make a difference to an individual author/artist.

As I understand it, OpenAI could still be on the hook for up to $150K per article if it can be demonstrated it is wilful copyright violation. It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental. But then OpenAI is, like several other tech unicorns, a bad faith manufacturing device.

That’s a pretty narrow view of journalism. If you look into newspapers, it’s not just a list of events but also opinion pieces, original research, reports etc. The main infringement isn’t with the basic reporting of facts but with the original part that’s done by the writer.

> The whole of journalism is taking the acts of others and repeating them

Hilarious (and depressing) that this is what people think journalists do.

Or you could just not do illegal and/or immoral things that are worthy of reporting.

This is terribly unpersuasive