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Comment by sagarm | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it totally normal to write articles / blog posts that effectively summarize, and often quote from, news articles?

My impression is that it’s not necessarily legal, but going after bloggers and proving damages based is just a huge waste of their time. OpenAI came by with their fat stack of funding and changed that.

It is legal. Fair use. People have been doing it for ages. Almost every article you've ever read has some fair use of another article, book or news item, etc.

When it becomes a service where you make money but the source doesn’t is it still fair use?

Yeah. No one is out there suing the shit out of cliff notes because they published a summary of Catcher in the Rye.

they might if cliff notes starting copy pasting parts of the source into their articles and passing it off as original writing though :)

The Tolkien estate should get busy suing all the fantasy writers, comic artists, game developers and board and card game companies. Lots of cash there.

They have done some of that actually. Tolkien will be public domain in the nations that are at aithors death+50 in a few days. Sadly, it will be a much longer wait in mine and many others.

Newspapers generally don't "pass off" quotes as their own writing. They make clear which parts they quoted.

What parent poster meant is that it is normal that news organisations reference each other and report/cite/rephrase each other reports. For example all other news papers reported about the Watergate scandal reported by Bernstein&Woodward in the Washington Post.

Those cite the original source that they used to write the article, the gpt models don't.

Depends on your prompt

Yeah but for every instance of that are face hugger links blogs that will rewrite the article and almost meant to deprive the source of any credit.

It’s not clear to me where the line is.

No, in US law at least there can be no copyright of facts, only presentation. If you convey the same facts in different words that isn't a matter of fair use, it's never even a matter of copyright in the first place.

How about things that aren’t quite facts? Reviews, opinions, etc.

Illegal to have the same opinion as someone?

I was inarticulate. Imagine a business that goes to some trouble to review businesses or products. Can we lift those and serve them ourselves? Non facts…

No, it is very specifically and deliberately fair use. That is the primary intended purpose of fair use. The New York Times doesn't own the news; they just own their articles.

I think the issue is that they trained ChatGPT on the New York Times' proprietary IP without paying licensing fees and, the Times argues, that is illegal. By way of proof the Times has examples of ChatGPT dumping out articles verbatim.

This is exactly how I understand it. There’s a lot ink getting spilled about “summarizing isn’t illegal” and “what about Cliffs Notes” but that isn’t what this is about.

If the verbatim examples that have been going around are true, that’s bad. I’d love to know more details around it — prompts used, whether that’s an old model, etc. This seems like plagiarism more than anything.

IMO it's pretty hard to training an LLM isn't a transformative use. It's clearly not just copying, or even excerpting. Even if it was just compression (and it's not), they're only providing model output not distributing the "compressed" NYT articles.

Yielding verbatim snippets of copyrighted content is a problem for OpenAI though.

Perhaps we will see the courts revisit this idea of "transformative" works and formulate something more useful. I'm my opinion, you can't build an LLM unless you have a large amount of data with which to train it. Given the huge amount of money companies like OpenAI hope to generate, it seems unreasonable that content creators would not be rewarded.

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