this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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Microsoft, OpenAI sued for copyright infringement by nonfiction book authors in class action claim::The new copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI comes a week after The New York Times filed a similar complaint in New York.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft or even OpenAI by any means, but all these lawsuits just seem so... lazy and greedy?

It isn't like ChatGPT is just spewing out the entirety of their works in a single chat. In that context, I fail to see how seeing snippets of said work returned in a Google summary is any different than ChatGPT or any other LLM doing the same.

Should OpenAI and other LLM creators use ethically sourced data in the future? Absolutely. They should've been doing so all along. But to me, these rich chumps like George R. R. Martin complaining that they felt their data was stolen without their knowledge and profited off of just feels a little ironic.

Welcome to the rest of the 6+ billion people on the Internet who've been spied on, data mined, and profited off of by large corps for the last two decades. Where's my god damn check? Maybe regulators should've put tougher laws and regulations in place long ago to protect all of us against this sort of shit, not just businesses and wealthy folk able to afford launching civil suits and shakey grounds. It's not like deep learning models are anything new.

Edit:

Already seeing people come in to defend these suits. I just see it like this: AI is a tool, much like a computer or a pencil are tools. You can use a computer to copyright infringe all day, just like a pencil can. To me, an AI is only going to be plagiarizing or infringing if you tell it to. How often does AI plagiarize without a user purposefully trying to get it to do so? That's a genuine question.

Regardless, the cat's out of the bag. Multiple LLMs are already out in the wild and more variations are made each week, and there's no way in hell they're all going to be reigned in. I'd rather AI not exist, personally, as I don't see protections coming for normal workers over the next decade or two against further evolutions of the technology. But, regardless, good luck to these companies fighting the new Pirate Bay-esque legal wars for the next couple of decades.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Already seeing people come in to defend these suits. I just see it like this: AI is a tool, much like a computer or a pencil are tools. You can use a computer to copyright infringe all day, just like a pencil can. To me, an AI is only going to be plagiarizing or infringing if you tell it to. How often does AI plagiarize without a user purposefully trying to get it to do so? That’s a genuine question.

You are misrepresenting the issue. The issue here is not if a tool just happens to be able to be used for copyright infringement in the hands of a malicious entity. The issue here is whether LLM outputs are just derivative works of their training data. This is something you cannot compare to tools like pencils and pcs which are much more general purpose and which are not built on stole copyright works. Notice also how AI companies bring up "fair use" in their arguments. This means that they are not arguing that they are not using copryighted works without permission nor that the output of the LLM does not contain any copyrighted part of its training data (they can't do that because you can't trace the flow of data through an LLM), but rather that their use of the works is novel enough to be an exception. And that is a really shaky argument when their services are actually not novel at all. In fact they are designing services that are as close as possible to the services provided by the original work creators.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Sure. Trickle-down FTW.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Its wild to me how so many people seem to have got it into their head that cheering for the IP laws that corporations fought so hard for is somehow left wing and sticking up for the little guy.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Just a heads-up, libertarian is usually understood, in the american sense, as meaning right libertarian, including so-called anarcho-capitalists. It's understood to mean people who believe that the right to own property is absolutely fundamental. Many libertarians don't believe in intellectual property but some do. Which is to say that in american parlance, the label "libertarian" would probably include you. Just FYI.

Also, I don't know what definition of "left" you are using, but it's not a common one. Left ideologies typically favor progress, including technological progress. They also tend to be critical of property, and (AFAIK universally) reject forms of property that allow people to draw unearned rents. They tend to side with the wider interests of the public over an individual's right to property. The grandfather comment is perfectly consistent with left ideology.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If I want to be able to argue that having any copyleft stuff in the training dataset makes all the output copyleft -- and I do -- then I necessarily have to also side with the rich chumps as a matter of consistency. It's not ideal, but it can't be helped. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Wait. I first thought this was sarcasm. Is this sarcasm?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

No. I really do think that all AI output should be required to be copyleft if there's any copyleft in the training dataset (edit for clarity: unless there's also something else with an incompatible license in it, in which case the output isn't usable at all -- but protecting copyleft is the part I care about).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Huh. Obviously, you don't believe that a copyleft license should trump other licenses (or lack thereof). So, what are you hoping this to achieve?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Obviously, you don’t believe that a copyleft license should trump other licenses (or lack thereof)

I'm not sure what you mean. No licenses "trump" any other license; that's not how it works. You can only make something that's a derivative work of multiple differently-licensed things if the terms of all the licenses allow it, something the FSF calls "compatibility." Obviously, a proprietary license can never be compatible with a copyleft one, so what I'm hoping to achieve is a ruling that says any AI whose training dataset included both copyleft and proprietary items has completely legally-unusable output. (And also that any AI whose training dataset includes copyleft items along with permissively-licensed and public domain ones must have its output be copyleft.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yes, but what do you hope to achieve by that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In your mind are the publishers the rich chumps, or Microsoft?

For copyleft to work, copyright needs to be strong.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

I was just repeating the language the parent commenter used (probably should've quoted it in retrospect). In this case, "rich chumps" are George R.R. Martin and other authors suing Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I fail to see how seeing snippets of said work returned in a Google summary is any different than ChatGPT or any other LLM doing the same.

Just because it was available for the public internet doesn't mean it was available legally. Google has a way to remove it from their index when asked, while it seems that OpenAI has no way to do so (or will to do so).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)
[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I hear those kinds of arguments a lot, though usually from the exact same people who claimed nobody would be convicted of fraud for NFT and crypto scams when those were at their peak. The days of the wild west internet are long over.

Theft in the digital space is a very real thing in the eyes of the law, especially when it comes to copyright infringement. It‘s wild to me how many people seem to think Microsoft will just get a freebie here because they helped pioneering a new technology for personal gain. Copyright holders have a very real case here and I‘d argue even a strong one.

Even using user data (that they own legally) for machine learning could get them into trouble in some parts of the developed world because users 10 years ago couldn‘t anticipate it could be used that way and not give their full consent for that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Personally, I think public info is fair game - consent or not, it's public. They're not sharing the source material, and the goal was never plagiarism. There was a period where it became coherent enough to get very close to plagiarism, but it's been moving past that phase very quickly

Microsoft, especially with how they scraped private GitHub repos (and the things I'm sure Google and Facebook just haven't gotten caught doing with private data) is way over the line for me. But I see that more as being bad stewards of private data - they shouldn't be looking at it, their AI shouldn't be looking at it, the public shouldn't be able to see it, and they probably failed on all counts

Granted, I think copyright is a bullshit system. Normal people don't get any protection, because you need to pay to play. Being unable to defend it means you lose it, and in most situations you're going to spend way more on legal costs than you could possibly get back.

I also think the most important thing is that this tech is spread everywhere, because we can't have one group in charge of the miracle technology... It's too powerful.

Google has all the data they could need, they've bullied the web into submission... They don't have to worry about copyright, they control the largest ad network and dominate search (at least for now).

It sucks that you can take any artist's visual work, and fine tune a network to replicate endless rough facsimile in a few days. I genuinely get how that must feel violating.

But they're going to be screwed when the corporate work dries up for a much cheaper option, and they're going to have to deal with the flood of AI work... Copyright won't help them, it's too late for it to even slow it down

If companies did something wrong, have it out in court. My concern is that they're going to pass laws on this that claim it's for the artists, but effectively gatekeep AI to tech giants

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Even using user data (that they own legally) for machine learning could get them into trouble in some parts of the developed world because users 10 years ago couldn‘t anticipate it could be used that way and not give their full consent for that.

Where, for example?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The European Union, for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's not right. It explicitly is legal in the EU.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That is not how the EU works. Member states can get together to tarif and sanction behavior, but just because the EU generally allows something doesn't mean all member states have to abide. Different constitutions and all. Besides I'd like to know where exactly any EU resolution explicitly allows corporations to throw any data they have at any technology or LLM's specifically even when nobody ever gave consent to that. Corporations have to be quite specific for how they process your data and broadly saying "machine learning stuff" 10 years ago isn't really water proof.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

No. EU legislation often has so-called opening clauses that allow member states to tune "EU laws" to their needs but it's not the default behavior.

You seem to have the GDPR in mind. It regulates personal data, meaning data that can be tied to a person. If that is not possible, the GDPR has no objections.