ChatGPT in trouble: OpenAI sued for stealing everything anyone’s ever written on the Internet
www.firstpost.com
OpenAI's ChatGPT and Sam Altman are in massive trouble. OpenAI is getting sued in the US for illegally using content from the internet to train their LLM or large language models
  • archomrade [he/him]English
    12•1 year ago

    I’m honestly at a loss for why people are so up at arms about OAI using this practice and not Google or Facebook or Microsoft, ect. It really seems we’re applying a double standard just because people are a bit pissed at OpenAI for a variety of reasons, or maybe just vaguely mad at the monetary scale of “tech giants”

    My 2 cents: I don’t think content posted on the open internet (especially content produced by users on a free platform being claimed not by those individuals but by the platforms themselves) should be litigated over, when that information isnt even being reproduced but being used on derivative works. I think it’s conceptually similar to an individual reading a library of books to become a writer and charge for the content they produce.

    I would think a piracy community would be against platforms claiming ownership over user generated content at all.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      https://youtu.be/9xJCzKdPyCo

      This video can answer just about any question you ask. It’s long, but it’s split up into chapters so you can see what questions he’s answering in that chapter. I do recommend you watch the whole thing if you can. There’s a lot of information that I found very insightful and thought provoking

      • archomrade [he/him]English
        1•1 year ago

        Couple things:

        While I appreciate this gentleman’s copywrite experience, I do have a couple comments:

        • his analysis seems primarily focused from a law perspective. While I don’t doubt there is legal precedent for protection under copywrite law, my personal opinion is that copywrite is a capitalist conception that is dependent on an economic reality I fundamentally disagree with. Copywrite is meant to protect the livelihoods of artists, but I don’t think anyone’s livelihood should be dependent on having to sell labor. More often, copywrite is used to protect the financial interests of large businesses, not individual artists. The current litigation is between large media companies and OAI, and any settlement isn’t likely to remunerate much more than a couple dollars to individual artists, and we can’t turn back the clock to before AI could displace the jobs of artists, either.

        • I’m not a lawyer, but his legal argument is a little iffy to me… Unless I misunderstood something, he’s resting his case on a distinction between human inspiration (i.e. creative inspiration on derivative works) and how AI functions practically (i.e. AI has no subjective “experience” so it cannot bring its own “hand” to a derivative work). I don’t see this as a concrete argument, but even if I did, it is still no different than individual artists creating derivative works and crossing the line into copywrite infringement. I don’t see how this argument can be blanket applied to the use of AI, rather than individual cases of someone using AI on a project that draws too much from a derivative work.

        The line is even less clear when discussing LLMs as opposed to T2I or I2I models, which I believe is what is being discussed in the lawsuit against OAI. Unlike images from DeviantArt and Instagram, text datasets from sources like reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter aren’t protected under copywrite like visual media. The legal argument against the use of training data drawn from public sources is even less clear, and is even more removed to protecting the individual users and is instead a question of protecting social media sites with questionable legal claim to begin with. This is the point id expect this particular community would take issue with: I don’t think reddit or Twitter should be able to claim ownership over their user’s content, nor do I think anyone should be able to revoke consent over fair use just because it threatens our status quo capitalist system.

        AI isn’t going away anytime soon, and litigating over the ownership of the training data is only going to serve to solidify the dominant hold over our economy by a handful of large tech giants. I would rather see large AI models be nationalized, or otherwise be protected from monopolization.