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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

The NYT lawsuit includes 100 examples of GPT-4 being able to produce copies of its training data, not using RAG: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/Lawsuit-Document-dk...

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NYT is cheating here because their prompt is a portion of articles from NYT. A normal user of ChatGPT does not do that. If ChatGPT reproduces text from NYT articles under "normal use" where the prompt is not designed to get it to reproduce text then that would certainly be copyright violation.

Two comments up in this thread GPT cannot reproduce copyrighted text.

Now GPT can reproduce copyrighted text, but only under some circumstances that are totally cheating so they don't count?

I use torrents to download Linux isos, but if I know a special thing to ask for I can get movies?

It's not a normal request your honour, pay no attention.

Intent matters in the tool's usage result ; be it a torrent client, a knife or a LLM. It really seems disingenuous to blatantly prompt the llm to regurgitate a precise work by "citing" a portion, and then says the equivalent of: "see, knives kill (as you can see now that I plunged one in this poor victim...)!". Don't do that then, knives are still fine to peal apples.

So creating a database that contains copyrighted text is fine as long as you say "please don't execute the queries that extract the copyrighted text I stored for you"?

Not sure that line of argumentation is going to get you very far.

Particularly since those texts that are not precise verbatim copies of the copyrighted text that you do store appear to be derivative works of that copyrighted text.

And thus also fall under copyright.

I think that's fine. Chatgpt is my typewriter. It only becomes a copyright issue if I choose to publish it's output, right? And then the fault is with me for distributing it, not chatgpt for typing it.

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