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Comment by artembugara | Hacker News Reader

Have a question to the Generative AI experts here.

So, I can use smthg like GPT-4 to label data and then use that as a train set for my own LLM, right?

EDIT: adding this from OpenAI Restriction TOS: "(iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI;"

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> I can use smthg like GPT-4 to label data and then use that as a train set for my own LLM, right?

Yes, almost all improved LLama models are tuned exactly that way (trained on examples of questions and answers from say GPT 4). If OpenAI stole copyrighted works to train their models it is morally fair game to do the same to them regardless of their TOS. It's not like they can prove it anyway.

Plus there's the other point where they also say that everything generated by their models is public domain, so which one is it eh?

This ... but we all know business is corrupt.

The current attempts to spur on regulation by OpenAI is moat building

We were complacent while it happened because OpenAI wasn't a business, it wasn't seen as unethical to use community work to contribute to community research. Now they're entrenched and pulled the rug out from the community, whilst also trying to shut the door on anyone else.

Just a really disappointing series of events, the money and profit were never the big issue.

I'm a lawyer so one should never break the law.

Nonethless, I can observe and predict that non-consensual "open sourcing" of these models would likely end up probably the best and safest way to do all of this stuff.

Because by training it they created something new.

I don't mind just making a point.

But I don't think they mind. I don't believe that this type of model training is able to be bleeding edge which should guarantee that openai has enough motivation to continue the development and having a healthy competition

It's against the terms of service to do the generation, but the generated text is not copyrighted. Those are different things.

GPT-4 is trained on a large number of web pages, some of which will have had their own terms of service.

Not only web sites, full books from scribd and other sources.

see LinkedIn vs HiQ (which HiQ won) covering fair use of logged-out web pages.

I have to log in to OpenAI to generate conversations but the conversations I can post on my own logged-out blog. It's the same thing OpenAI would probably say if they got sued because GPT spits copyrighted content it found on a logged-out webpage. They can't reasonably expect people to not use them for training.

Is it legal for one of their computer systems to access mine without my consent, even if publicly routable via the internet?

If I found an open port on a government computer it is still illegal for me to access that isn't it? Is the difference that this is port 80/443 and happens to serve HTTP requests something that has been described in law or court?

show me the ToS where it says that, and I still won't care, because it would absolute be legal under the same principle openAI is using for the training data as a transformative work.

FYI: here are the relevant parts from the TOS:

(iii) use output from the Services to develop models that compete with OpenAI; (iv) except as permitted through the API

sounds like you are allowed to as long as it's from the api, as this "imaginary" restriction isn't in https://openai.com/policies/api-data-usage-policies, or https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies.

Use of copyrighted material in such a way that it’s aggregated into statistical properties is almost certainly fair use. Use of the model to produce reproductions of copyrighted material then consuming or distributing it is almost certainly violating the copyright. But it was the facsimile of the material that’s the violation, not the abstract use of it to generate an aggregate model.

You understand these things have a very very wide interpretation scope here that has yet to be tested in court. I wouldn’t make these statements so confidently as courts tend to reinterpret the law significantly for the balance of societal factors when serious technology changes occur.

AI generated work is not copyright-able. I guess the courts later could disagree though.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

If the AI generates a new Eric Clapton album, with the same similar voice and guitar playing style?

your example doesn't have to be AI generated. Human cover-bands play Song X in the style of Y all the time.

They are in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/artificial-intel...

This is true - afaik there’s been no specific rulings on whether training models on copyright material is a violation. But to my mind it harkens back to stuff like xerox and such where the tool itself isn’t the violating thing it’s the use of the tool. Likewise, derivative works are often largely reproductions with minor variations and are protected under fair use. A model that takes enormous amounts of data and distills it into a tiny vector representation way below the information theoretic levels for any meaningful fidelity and mixes and overlaps data in a way that the original data isn’t plausibly stored in the model… I’m definitely not going to wager my life that’s fair use, but I would wager my company on it.

In the history of media law I’ve seen judged lean into whatever interpretation balances the ecosystem more than what is “literally the law”. The law is meant to serve people not the other way around. I hope judges will understand the contribution and theft can’t just be “haha fuck humanity love, openAI”

Ok, what about the open source and research models? I wouldn’t wager much on openai keeping a lead indefinitely. Certainly not to establish case law on what’s a pretty new technology (at least in its current use)

Yes, laws are about politics and dispute resolution more than reasoning or correctness. Focusing on the pure logic is a trap for the computationally inclined.

I want to train my own LLM on public but copyrighted data. I think this is serving humanity (and fucking OpenAI). I also think it is ethical because there's a big difference between "learning from" and "copying".

Your proposed reading of the law means only big tech will be able to afford the license fees to train on large amounts of data.

How do YOU plan on compensating those whose labor helped you? I bet you don’t. Same thing you are just imagining being David rather than Goliath makes it ok for you.

It's not always necessary to compensate those whose labor helped you. I haven't compensated many of the open source projects I use, for example, even those who clearly want me to (with nagging pop-ups). If the use of copyrightable material to train a model is legal, and it does not legally require compensation, it might be difficult to argue that the use of such material should be compensated or else. It would depend IMO on whether there are norms in place for this kind of thing, and I don't necessarily see wide agreement.

It is my understanding that this is how “alignment” works.

That is, openAI paid people to chat with their LLM to fine tune it and then other LLMs use chatgpt to generate training data to align their models.

There are three ways

1. make your own RLHF dataset - like OpenAI and Open Assistant

2. exfiltrate data from a bigger/better LLM - Vicuna & family

3. use your pre-trained LLM to generate RLAIF data, no leeching - ConstitutionalAI, based on a set of rules instead of labelling examples

I wonder whether these approaches fit into the above categories:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13735

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11206

That is against their ToS though if you use your new LLM commercially.

So what are they going to do about it?

That escalated quickly.

Great question! I don’t know the end game there. Maybe if they suspected their model was used they would sue, and in discovery find you used their model for training?

Maybe we don't need to worry, OpenLLaMA is under training right now. It will be the commercial version of LLaMA.

> Update 05/22/2023

> We are happy to release our 700B token checkpoint for the OpenLLaMA 7B model and 600B token checkpoint for the 3B model. We’ve also updated the evaluation results. We expect the full 1T token training run to finish at the end of this week.

https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama

So we could develop on LLaMA for now and switch to OpenLLaMA later.

Nothing until it’s worth their while.

MS lawyers have a good track record at sending out those scary cease&desist letters

I don't think that works. LLM-generated contents are not copyrightable.

Breach of contract for violating the TOS agreed to when signinf uo for the service doesn’t depend on copyright.

Right but cease and desist usually relates to intellectual property or copyright matters, typically not TOS violations. Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Cease and desist can be used for any issues where the person or entity issuing the C&D thinks they have a legal right that is being violated and wants to put the violator on notice in the hopes of securing a change in behavior short of legal action.

What I don't understand - is there anything that would prevent Alice from publishing ChatGPT prompts and outputs for anyone to use, with no T&C attached?

Once Alice has done that, is there anything to prevent Bob, who has never agreed to ChatGPT ToS, to use those prompts and outputs to train his own models to compete with OpenAI's?

(Purely from a contractual/legal/IP angle rather than ML/technical.)

Is a terms of service considered a contract?

They can terminate your account.

> So what are they going to do about it?

If they think they can prove you used it to develop a competing service, sue you for breaking the TOS and recover the greater of the harm it did to their business or the amount of your profits from the service that are due to the uae of GPT-4 in violation of the agreement.

Have companies managed to get awarded damages in lawsuits against their customers who merely broke their terms of service?

Is there existing case law here?

As far as I remember, I fully own all the right to the output of OpenAI (for example).

I wonder how they reconcile naming themselves "Open"AI, telling people that generated works can be used however they please, except for training a potential competitor.

And yet they trained theirs on commercial content on the internet. If that’s legal I doubt their argument holds up in court right?

Of course it will hold up in court, it's their service and their terms of service.

They trained on publicly-available (no signup with TOS agreement) data, on the theory that training is fair use.

You signed up and agreed to their TOS to use GPT-4.

The legal situations are not similar.

OTOH, lots of people are openly using GPT-4 in one way or another to develop models, though they might generally be at arm’s length from people intending to sell services.

> They trained on publicly-available (no signup with TOS agreement) data, on the theory that training is fair use.

They openly state they used thousands of books from a pirate site as a training source. Go look up the datasets listed in the GPT-3 paper.

So set up a shell company that uses GPT4 to make public domain examples of what RLHF data would look like, and then the parent company takes that data afterwards since it's public domain. Shell company didn't break TOS.

It prohibits anything that competes with OpenAI services i.e as long as you're not literally providing an LLM API commercially you should be fine

Does it compete with them if you stop paying for their API?

Yup, totally. This is a form of knowledge distillation. Openai, or other foundational model providers, can't really do anything about it.

Well they can sue you and bankrupt you by delaying trial for a decade. That's how the US patent system works anyways...

Sue on what grounds? It will be quickly dismissed.

That is not how the US legal system works. You can sue someone for and regardless of merit, and they will have to defend themselves. That costs time and legal fees. If they lose, they can appeal, and continue appealing. If it's baseless, they'll lose, but you still spend a lot of money and time dealing with the lawsuits.

If by quickly you mean 5 to 10 years of paying a retainer on a lawyer sure. Even if you win the case you lose in life. Most individuals can't afford 500k in legal fees to have them be reimbursed years later. Big companies have lawyers on staff at a discount and they play these games every day.

This happens with illegal things all the time. IE manager sexually harasses someone on video or something, it's some CEOs nephew who did it, so they fire the person who got harassed. The person who got harassed now has to aquire legal counsel on top of paying relocation claw backs etc. Few years ago by and the person who was in the right is trying to hold down a job, a family, and the stress of the legal battle. The company offers to settle two years in for 50k and 99% of people take it, sometimes at a loss. Also, getting employed is a lot harder when a background check reveals suing a previous employer or really any company, because shocker, most companies do illegal shit regularly... So it's almost always best to settle

I realize I painted a picture pretty far from my previous statement but I figured you were new in your career and could benefit from an allegory of how stuff like this goes down.

Yes, and in fact that's the best method available if you want good performance. I would suggest using a local open source model to do this however, to cut down on costs and make it far simpler to deal with than the unwieldy OpenAI systems.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.02301.pdf

Indeed, fine tuning with either synthetic data (as you are proposing) or human review works like that. you can read more here: https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf

not an AI expert but from a talk I recently heard... if there is a mismatch in training data between the "teacher" LLM and "student" LLM, you risk teaching the student to hallucinate or to ignore information

Is "ca" "can" or "can't"?

can

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