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Comment by potatoman22 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this against the OpenAI TOS?

How many terms of service did OpenAI break to gather their initial training set? Turnabout is fair play, this is justifiable piracy.

It seemingly is but it is also one of the most popular ways that public models are being updated with SFT. "Trained using ChatGPT output" is something blatantly advertised in the literature of some fairly popular "open" models. I'm not sure where that's headed legally but it's surprisingly common.

The academic work is pretty safe as long as it isn't productized. The open models have a prime facie case to stand on. Using output is okay if you aren't directly competing with openai, even according to their tos.

> (e) use Output (as defined below) to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services. However, you can use Output to (i) develop artificial intelligence models primarily intended to categorize, classify, or organize data (e.g., embeddings or classifiers), as long as such models are not distributed or made commercially available to third parties and (ii) fine tune models provided as part of our Services

But then those models are possibly used downstream, EG for Mistral's "medium" API model (and many other startups).

I guess if its behind an API and no one discloses the training data, OpenAI can't prove anything? Even obvious GPTisms could ostensibly be from internet data.

Isn't it awkward because that's only plagiarism if all of the LLMs around are?

My interpretation is that they prohibit using distilled models to compete against OpenAI, i.e. to offer a foundation model as a service. This particular app is a product not a foundation model so seems pretty clearly fine to me.

Of course, this restriction is commonly ignored (eg 'open source' inference server companies offering distilled models) and who knows what applied products OpenAI will eventually build.

My question also, but even Google Gemini Pro does it. When announced, it'd say it was made by OpenAI :)

Might've been a small identity crisis as well.

Probably, but it's not like OpenAI has the standing to sue anyone for TOS violations. The most they will do is revoke access.

Technically, yeah. OpenAI are on the other end of copyright violations on many other fronts imho, for what that is worth.

Which means they could terminate your service. But nothing else would probably happen.

So what? New York Times also didn't consent to being used for the training of OpenAI models

And NYT is suing OAI/MS. Two wrongs don't make a right... or maybe they do, but that doesn't immunize you from legal fees or a botched exit :)

If NYT wins that will sink probably every LLM model out there

Considering all the open models that already exist and are yet to be created before all the rulings and appeals are done, that toothpaste ain't going back in the tube.

...I think you missed the point. OAI/MS can sue the author or at least cut off API access. If that happens, the fact that OAI is under fire from NYT doesn't somehow obviate the author's need to cover some massive legal bills for the foreseeable future.

The NYT case could take years. In the meantime OAI could choose to go after ToS violators.

The legal system can accommodate more than one unresolved court case at a time. We don't like put a semaphore on related cases or anything like that. (Or, sometimes we do, but guess who you need to hire for many many billable hours to make that happen in your case?).

So, the legal system can accommodate the NYT case against OAI and an OAI case against the author. The operative question is: can the author's pocketbook also accommodate?

(Or, more to the point, can the author accommodate losing access to gpt4? What happens when he wants to launch a new feature or pivot to a new product?)

Then they cut off the API Process and I just make a new account. Who cares? I doubt they would sue, because the Risk of Loosing would give a precedent. It's much easier and cheaper to scare people away from doing this and writing mean letters. Those ToS would also probably be unenforceable in many countries outside the US beyond terminating an account

I agree on both points. Was just engaging with the legal aspect because that's what this thread was about. But now we've converged to the actual reason the author should probably care: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39049622

If you never want an exit then probably doesn't matter.

Nah, if it ever starts to look like NYT might win, MSFT will just do a hostile takeover.

Market cap of NYTimes is 8B, OpenAI is 80B, MSFT is 2.7T, you do the math.

You can't just hostile takeover the NYT. The Salzberger family, who have run it for generations, have a dual class structure and a pretty classic setup to keep control.

Their TOS: Don't steal anything we stole.

Also know as the Google search license.

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