US gov sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
--- The free rider problem is also a form of market failure... The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations do not reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient. ---
The US government has just made the NY Times content a public good, and in doing so, allowed openai to create a private good, for which they will be remunerated instead.
It could be argued that this means the US government has effectively taken profit from one company to fund another, under the guise of helping global competitiveness, and whilst this may be the current M.O. of the Trump administration it means predominantly domestic companies are effectively forced into providing export subsidies for the new industry, and monopolising (or oligopolising?) an incumbent.
I wonder if on this basis Seedance could also be equally legally be allowed to use copyrighted media for its video AI, so effectively they're also pulling the legs out from under the film industry too.
I'd much prefer a world where everything is not locked behind a login with bonus 2FA, but that sure seems like where we're headed.
For use as training data you still need some right to it AFAICT.
Which will be also interesting for prompts used by the users of these AI companies, because even if those prompts contain copyrighted data, they can be used for training because training is transforming these prompts into something else.
There's no sense in worrying how closely the university aligns real policy with various theoretical economic ideals.
If we allow copyright law to directly inhibit technological advancement then we defeat the very purpose of copyright law.
That said, it need not inhibit if they just pay for using it. Hopefully they will sue for reasonable compensation, noting that they have such a privilege only in a handful of countries so any restriction is strictly a restriction on those countries, which is a huge technological advantage for all the rest.
I try to see both sides.
You can be right, and dead at the same time.
Just because I think they filed stupid doesn't imply that I think they are wrong.
Negotiate from there.
They may say they have the best of intentions, but call me skeptical.
We disagree on this point.
America won't let China have defense technology that it doesn't get to use.
It has nothing to do with OpenAI, or any other company, nor artists, nor right from wrong. If OpenAI eats small children for breakfast, or feeds all the hungry in Africa, makes no difference whatsoever.
You can ignore that fact and stand on a mountain and shout about OpenAI being evil all day long.
But you're going to lose the lawsuit if you ignore the facts of reality. No matter how loud you cry about it.
1 single person in their basement would be thrown in jail for downloading the whole internet, but a company with “plans” is fine.
Not sure if you read my comment in a different light or not, but I do get the feeling you misunderstood my meaning.
Would you be happy if I sold your house for $10,000, so long as I give you half the proceeds? Or would you, I dunno, call the police.
If you copy what my house looks like, no, I won't call the police.
Especially if you copy it for the purpose of empowering the police (govt) to protect my actual house.
That's a much more accurate analogy.
I would like clarity on copyright rules and regulations but it's hard to sympathize with NYT when they have been so aggressive with their AI fear-mongering. The authors and artists must be the centerpiece instead of giant corporations. I doubt they will use any leverage to actually improve ethical usage of copyright with AI, and they only want to protect shareholder profits.
https://aiinstitute.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-ne...
How about those music AIs, why aren't they training on classical music and theory textbooks? Why are they being accused of training on copyrighted music? I remember one chat about music AIs, the proponent/enthusiast mentioned "creating" a song by using "johnny cash" in the prompt to get a song in that distinctive style.
I will be the first to admit how useful these AIs are, while I don't use them to "create music", I sure as heck have used them for chats and to write programs. I'm not one of those naysayers talking about the outputs being crap because despite some errors here and there, I've found great utility from these things and I don't even mess with "frontier models" from openai or anthropic. My gripes are about the costs about what we're doing here.
When chatting about "fair use", we can go with the legal definitions which are clear as mud, but I think a better and more sensible path forward would be to consider all the ramifications of their use. Even the term "fair use" implies results much better than we're actually seeing, the economic forces in play here do not seem fair at all.
>I think it makes sense to say training on material you legally acquired is fair use.
First an aside, there's no law against accessing copyrighted material. OpenAI is certainly welcome to read the New York Times. I can legally buy dvds but the legality of redistributing rips is only considered should I redistribute them.
One of the considerations of "fair use" might be the possibility of benefits or drawbacks to society of those uses that fall under "fair use" exceptions. I would hold the AI's use to that standard, and thats really when we should take the entirety into consideration. This is a big topic tho. We want laws because we believe they benefit society, when loopholes appear we'd normally like them closed, obviously there are branches of the US government that are simply not "normal" right now so theres that lol
I will also admit that a narrower view of "fair use" is to equate "training" of these AIs with human use of the material, after all someone reading the new york times are certainly not infringing on anybody's copyright, in fact they're likely fufilling the new york times internally held purpose, ie., they do the writing, they hope to be read with whatever profit to them that might bring. Just like an AI reading that page by controlling a web browser right? Well this is a good rabbit hole too and you're welcome to try to present that case also, because I've been of the opinion for the last few years that LLMs are not people, and I can chat about that all day.
Its easy to post that you don't understand, so if you'd like to post that again this is fine with me, I'm often a very misunderstood individual :)
yeah I joke about chatting up my ai gf but there's not going to be any sex lol
>and inference is not analogous to "redistributing rips"
I think you made both points previously so duly noted, your explanations are lacking tho.
>and that it's a reasonable position for fair use law to operate that way.
I think you said this too in a way. Which is interesting in a coincidental sort of way, I like working with loops. But what I do when producing a loop based techno whatever is I like to progress it somehow. The same thing over and over well I guess thats a thing too which is interesting, if you downloaded a heavily looped song, you can compress it by repeating one bar programmatically, granted its pretty lossy. its sort of how much information per measure of time, I like to call it "rpms", like for instance the first measure has high rpm, but if you loop it, each subsequent measure "loses rpms" so to speak. This doesn't take into consideration "incoherent noise" obviously, I like to take it as one measure amongst many.
Your text compresses nicely with suprisingly little loss of information!
>I think this benefits society.
Heh trump thinks energy can be created from nothing.
I appreciate the chat, but while I get the point you're making, I can also appreciate you're not interested in mine which is fair. I post as sort of a hobby, and I think I've sort of thrashed out a blog post maybe here, so thats appreciated.