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Comment by mynegation | Hacker News Reader

Suit claims that GPT reproduced passages from NYT almost verbatim.

I'm sure the NYT uses dictionaries, encyclopaedias and style books verbatim as well. And they don't invent the facts they write about. As journalists they are compiling and passing along other knowledge. You usually don't get a piece of their income when a journalist quotes you verbatim (people usually don't get paid for interviews).

If the NYT reproduces other content verbatim too much, it will get in trouble.

NYT doesn't reproduce the contents of the dictionary or encyclopaedia.

And even if they did it will be fine because those sources allow for it.

The point is that OpenAI never asked NYT for permission to use their data.

I don’t doubt it does. It’s easy to get it to spit out long answers from Stack Overflow verbatim, I’ve done it. Maybe some of the “transformative” nature of the LLM output is the removal of any authorship, copyright, license, and edit history information. ;) The point here is to supplant Google as the portal of information, right? It doesn’t have new information, but it’s pretty good at remixing the words from multiple sources, when it has multiple sources. One possible reason for their legal woes wrt copyright is that it’s also great at memorizing things that only have one source. My college Markov-chain text predictor would do the same thing and easily get stuck in local regions if it couldn’t match something else.

I don't think these can replace search engines.

Precisely.

This tired 'fair use' excuses from AI bros whilst the GPT has reproduced the article text verbatim, word for word and it being monetized without the permission from the copyright holder and source (NYT) is an obvious copyright violation 101. Full stop.

Again, just like Getty v. Stability, this copyright lawsuit will end in a licensing deal. Apple played it smart with their choice with licensing deals to train their GPT [0]. But this time, OpenAI knew they could get a license to train on NYT articles but chose not to.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2023/12/22/apple-wants-to-train-its-ai-w...

The four factors considered in a fair use test:

    the purpose and character of the use
    the nature of the copyrighted work
    the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
    the effect of the use upon the potential market.

Literally every single one of these factors has very complicated precedent and each one is an open question when it comes to AI. Since fair use is a balancing test this could go any way.

Stability took the easy way out because they didn't have billions of dollars to play around with and Microsoft to back them. Let's see what OpenAI does but calling everyone who disagrees with your naive interpretation of fair use "AI bros" is doing everyone a disservice.

> AI bros

What (or whom) do you consider to be an "AI bro?"

This sort of ad hominem generalization usually accompanies a weak argument.

It seems to be used by people who've previously used the term "tech bro."

Not saying I agree with this labeling, but it means approximately the same thing as “crypto bro”, but for AI

Young males that wear Tensorflow branded muscle tank tops and drive Mitsubishi Eclipse convertibles with the vanity plate OVERFIT. They are everywhere these days.

Thank you for the absurd visual. The vanity plate, especially, was worth saving for last. Somehow, the car is well suited, also. Love how they prefer Tensorflow over Pytorch, too.

https://i.imgur.com/4tF7q8M.jpg

The text generation is getting quite decent. The limbs disappearing into the car are somewhat less impressive.

I generally tend to downvote comments that use "x bros" for pretty much any x on sight for that reason. It's exceedingly rare for such a comment to be much more than a thinly veiled insult with little substance. Sometimes I might even agree with the insult, but it's still rarely appropriate here.

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