Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.
The existing industry that’s popped up around LLMs has conveniently ignored that what these models are doing may have been illegal the whole time and a lot of the experts knew it. This is why it’s so important for folks to realize that the industry is not just thin wrappers around ChatGPT (and that interesting applications of this technology are largely being pushed out by the lowest hanging fruit). If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight and we’ll have to rebuild it from scratch either with a new business model that pays authors or as open source/crowd sourced models (probably both). All that said we’re almost certainly better off. Open AI may have kicked off the most recent “gold rush” but their methods have been terrible for both the industry at large and for further development of the tech.
It always should have had the right business model where they paid for this access for AI training. They knew it was wrong but in their rush to be known they decided it was better to take without asking and then ask for forgiveness later. Regardless what happens now, people have already made a name for themselves swindling the likes of Microsoft out of it and will have long well-paying careers from it.
It seems like it was almost necessary to go through this phase for the sake of developing the tech. Doesn’t a lot of CS research uses web crawling algorithms to gather data without identifying that the information is licensed for such use? What about the fediverse? it remains unclear what the copyright and licensing will be should it come into question. There is no EULA to access fedi, just a set of open protocols.
I like this opinion: https://nyti.ms/3RGq2Iq#permid=130059838
Edit: I am referring to Bens reply.
Digital computer-aided plagiarism is new ground for copyright. Google has successfully defended Google Books with the defense that it is searching an archive of legally purchased and licensed books for specific information without reproducing the entire work. It’s the equivalent of visiting a physical library or bookstore and flipping through a book without actually purchasing it.
AI is something else entirely. It’s more like a program that incorporates ALL of the text (training data) and alters it according to an algorithm. This has been a problem with news-crawling websites for a long time. They would download copywritten text, edit multiple sources together, or use an algorithm to replace common words, etc., then post it on their own ad (and often virus) filled sites. It seems like AI is just a more sophisticated version of that. In any case, I’m not a lawyer so who knows what the argument will be on one side or the other.
