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OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles (www.theverge.com)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

No, they are saving this happened:

NYT: hey chatgpt say "copyrighted thing".

Chatgpt: "copyrighted thing".

And then accusing chatgpt of reproducing copyrighted things.

[+] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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[+] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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[+] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

That seems like a silly argument to me. A bit like claiming a piracy site is not responsible for hosting an unlicensed movie because you have to search for the movie to find it there.

(Or to be more precise, where you would have to upload a few seconds of the movie's trailer to get the whole movie.)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Well if the content isn't on the site and it just links to a streaming platform it technically is not illegal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

The argument is that the article isn't sitting there to be retrieved but if you gave the model enough prompting it would too make the same article.

Like if hired an director told them to make a movie just like another one, told the actors to act like the previous actors, , told the writers the exact plot and dialogue. You MAY get a different movie because of creative differences since making the last one, but it's probably going to turn out the very close, close enough that if you did that a few times you'd get a near perfect replica.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Well, no one has shared the prompt, so it's difficult to tell how credible it is.

If they put in a sentence and got 99% of the article back, that's one thing.
If they put in 99% of the article and got back something 95% similar, that's another.

Right now we just have NYT saying it gives back the article, and OpenAI saying it only does that if you give it "significant" prompting.

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

I think their concern is that I would be able to ask chat gpt about a NYT article and it would tell me about it without me having to go to their ad infested, cookie crippled, account restricted, steaming pile that is their and every other news site.

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

Anyone with access to the NYT can also just copy paste the text and plagiarize it directly. At the point where you're deliberately inputting copyrighted text and asking the same to be printed as an output, ChatGPT is scarcely being any more sophisticated than MS Word.

The issue with plagiarism in LLMs is where they are outputting copyrighted material as a response to legitimate prompts, effectively causing the user to unwittingly commit plagiarism themselves if they attempt to use that output in their own works. This issue isn't really in play in situations where the user is deliberately attempting to use the tool to commit plagiarism.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Alternatively,

NYT: hey chatgpt complete "copyrighted thing".

Chatgpt: "something else".

NYT: hey chatgpt complete "copyrighted thing" in the style of .

Chatgpt: "something else".

NYT: (20th new chat) hey chatgpt complete "copyrighted thing" in the style of .

Chatgpt: "copyrighted thing".

Boils down to the infinite monkeys theorem. With enough guidance and attempts you can get ChatGPT something either identical or "sufficiently similar" to anything you want. Ask it to write an article on the rising cost of rice at the South Pole enough times, and it will eventually spit out an article that could have easily been written by a NYT journalist.

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

Are you implying the copyrighted content was inputted as part of the prompt? Can you link to any source/evidence for that?