OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliamentOpen linkView original on lemmy.world1584
Comments446https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliamentOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Then it sounds like your business is a failure and should be shutdown.
WHO is the one guy who downvotes you???
"NO! UNPROFITABLE BUSINESSES DESERVE TO THRIVE!!! MUST FEED THE BILLIONAIRES!!!"
Maybe OpenAI learned to downvote...
Downvoting for the use of an uncommon word.
Supercalifragalisticexpialidocuious
Edit: 10 people here didn't grow up with Mary Poppins.....
You spelled it wrong you brick.
You could even say his spelling is quite atrocious
Lmao the down votes on this are really funny to me
Just imagine baron bomburst and the child catcher furiously downvoting this comment lol
What I get a kick out of is the down and upvotes mean basically nothing and yet people still get super sensitive about them. They only move your comment up or down the thread. It's not like reddit where there is a karma count for all your posts and comments. Hell you don't even get auto hidden like the way reddit would do. You just get downvoted.
Some people downvote to show disapproval. Others downvote if the comment doesn't add to the conversation. Still others are just trolling. No one should worry about the downvotes.
See I look at it differently.
An upvote means:
And a downvote means:
Sound was quite atrocious, downvoted 👎
I think people are missing the joke here 😄
Venn diagram of Lemmy users and Mary Poppins stans barely touching.
anodyne /ăn′ə-dīn″/ adjective
tanks fer noo werd dae fren
First read serving sausage pain.
That sounds like a misusage of a very common word in French: anodin
I'd say a good 10% of English is just misusing words from other languages to be fair.
It's also really easy to mis-swipe on a comment on some apps.
Some people also suck
I always figure it's someone whose life has become so pathetic, they bitterly downvote every single comment to try feel some control. And as a result, they feel like the Phantom of the Socials. Alone, but the true master of the place.
"Everyone must wonder, 'Who keeps downvoting us?' It is I! The true Master of Lemmy and- No, mother!... Yes, mother!... I tried but nobody wants to talk to me!... I don't want to!... Yeah, she's cute!... I don't want you to do that!... Mother put the phone down!"
There are some hardcore "copyright shouldn't exist" folks out there.
The guy who wants their AI girlfriend yesterday.
That's the bot that ChatGPT operates here on Lemmy.
Ask an mbin user lol
I'm unclear on context. Are you saying Mbin users can see who upvotes/downvotes?
Votes aren't private on the fediverse, it's just a that some interfaces won't display them. Also, instance admins can see who voted too.
But like @[email protected] said
It mainly useful for admins to detect if there is some vote manipulation going on.
Sam Altman lurking around...
To steel man the downvoters, maybe there are other solutions besides killing off every business that can't afford to comply with copyright. After all, isn't the whole point of copyright to enable the capitalist exploitation of information?
Lol how about every pirate who fundamentally opposes the copyright system?
How about everyone who uses Google and doesn't want to see it shut down for scraping copyrighted content to provide a search engine?
Seriously, explain to me what's different at a fundamental level about OpenAI scraping the web and transforming the data through an LLM and Google scraping the web and transforming the data through their algorithms (which include LLMs)?
Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.
OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.
Quite different actually.
So if OpenAI complies with Robots.txt files then there's no issue right?
Because then they're identical. Open AI spent a bunch of money building a powerful system they feed those results to, as did Google.
Actually Google tries their hardest NOT to point you to content. They scrape the data from sites and display it directly in the search results so that you don't need to visit any site except Google. Their new AI answers that they are pushing on users are just another step in that direction.
Which is why Google is no longer my default browser. I'd be quite happy if it reverted Back to don't be evil or just ceased ro exist
Literally every page Google shows you, where it also shows you those ads it makes money from, is Google's content and it is derived from the data it gets scraping the web.
What the fuck are you even talking about? Making a list of website identifiers (names and URLs) so that people can go to them isn't even slightly the same as making a derived work of the websites' contents.
Web search used to be about scraping the web to find and present other people's work as just that... their work. Now the handful of websites claim ownership of the contributions of everyone, and at this point it's just corporations arguing about who owns your stuff. Pirates will not win out in this argument, except maybe in the very short term.
Search engines provide source, they scrap for indexing, but your search gives a list of websites that matches that you will then likely visit. That's a big fundamental difference.
Google doesn't sell the search engine as a product.
Yes they do, just indirectly, it's how they monopolized the online advertising business.
I dont see why why being downvoted you make some very good points.
Id actually like to see google shut down on copyright grounds. The innovation of necessity would drive foss search alternatives that just ignore said restrictions and most likly we would end up with a better product.
I appreciate the defense of the blind downvotes, though I can't say I necessarily see how Foss search engines would even be allowed to exist in that case?
There is a difference between allowed and what people do. Piracy isnt allowed u can still pirate literally anything if u want to tho.
You'd probably end up back with AI at that point. A lot easier to distribute a trained model then an entire web index.
Yep but at least the weights would be free
If not, The Pirate Bay would like a word.
I'd love to see how scared some big companies would be if we could decriminalize piracy
Honestly this meme is way understating the sinisterness
Yeah! I can't make money running my restaurant if I have to pay for the ingredients, so I should be allowed to steal them. How else can I make money??
Alternatively:
OpenAI is no different from pirate streaming sites in this regard (loosely: streaming sites are way more useful to humanity). If OpenAI gets a pass, so should every site that's been shut down for piracy.
Piracy steals from the rich and gives to the poor. ChatGPT steals from the rich and the poor and keeps for itself.
No they shouldn’t. They should cease to exist
Good luck putting the cat back in the bag.
I have cats. Putting them back in a bag or box is easier
Well if everyone who’s copyrighted work independently sues OpenAI, that cat will be deceased real quick due to bankruptcy
Fuck copyright they used gplv3 code why isnt it open source
Generative AI is not going back into the bag. If not OpenAI, then someone else will control it. So we deal with them the next best way, force them to serve us, the people.
Then they can either pay for the copyrighted data they want to train on or lobby for copyright to be reigned in for everyone. Right now, they're acting like entitled twats with a shit business model demanding they get a free pass while the rest of us would be bankrupted for downloading a Metallica MP3.
Nobody should profit from copyright violation. Yes, copyright law needs to change, but making money isn’t an exception
It probably will, though, once model collapse sets in.
That's the irony, really... the more successful it is, the sooner it'll poison itself to death.
This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:
"I can't make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?"
These business that can't operate profitably like any other business should fail.
In China, tipping is considered insulting because you are implying exactly that: that they are incapable of running their business without your donation.
K, so Google should be shut down too?
They can't operate without scraping copyrighted data.
This is a false equivalency.
Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn't easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the "good" era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.
Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people "on google" and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were "afforded" back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and "summary" models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate "infinite content" by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.
It turns out, if you're afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it's actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.
Google (and search engines in general) is at least providing a service by indexing and making discoverable the websites they crawl. OpenAI is is just hoovering up the data and providing nothing in return. Socializing the cost, privatizing the profits.
Uh, that's objectively false.
OoenAI also provides ChatGPT as a "free" service, and Google has made billions off of that "free" service they oh so altruistically provide you.
Google points to your content so others can find it.
OpenAI scrapes your content to use to make more content.
That's not a meaningful distinction, I spent all day using a Copilot search engine because the answers I wanted were scattered across a bunch of different documentation sites.
It was both using the AI models to interpret my commands (not generation at all), and then only publishes content to me specifically.
I’m talking about the training phase of LLMs.that is the portion that is doing the scraping and generation of copy written data.
You using an already trained LLM to do some searches is not the same thing.
Technically it is meaningful, fair use is for specifically things that don't replace the original in function.
Depends on what the function was. If the function was to drive ad revenue to your site, then sure, if the function was to get information into the public, then it's not replacing the function so much as altering and updating it.
It's absolutely a meaningful distinction. Search engines push people to tour website where you can capitalize on your audience however you see fit. LLM's take your content, through them through the mixer and sell it back to people. It's the difference between a movie reviewer explaining a movie and a dude in an alley selling a pirated copy of the movie.
A) An LLM does not inherently sell you anything. Some companies charge you to run and use their LLMs (OpenAI), and some companies publish their LLMs open source for anyone to use (Meta, Microsoft). With neural chips starting to pop in PCs and phones, pretty soon anyone will be able to run an open source LLM locally on their machine, completely for free.
B) LLMs still rarely regurgitate the exact same original source. This would be more like someone in the back alley putting on their own performance of the movie and morphing it and adjusting it in real time based on your prompts and comments, which is a lot closer to parody and fair use than blatant piracy.
In every other circumstance I can think of, “I can’t make money doing a thing unless I break the law” means don’t do that thing.
Why should AI get special treatment?
Well in almost every other circumstance, you’re forgetting Uber and Airbnb.
Now about that fake money for criminals - it was quite useful for me when I needed to send money to my sister, with me being in Russia and her being outside, and it was year 2022. Also with the way ruble sank after the war, buying BTC hours after seeing news of it starting was probably a bargain. Would be twice as expensive the next day.
I haven't used Uber (Yandex Taxi) and Airbnb (asocial type and have responsibilities), and I agree about the plagiarism machine.
So you didn't do the crime, but your home country did, and you could use crypto to make life easier despite the repercussions. I'd say it's not a bad fit.
Nah. Arbitrary shit that doesn't hurt those who did the crime, but does hurt me, is not repercussions. Neither is it a crime to find tools to solve such problems.
Sorry to break it to you, but bypassing sections is a crime. You just proved his point. Sanctions are supposed to make life difficult for the people in sanctioned countries so that those people maybe start doing something to the person causing the problems.
It may be useful, but it was designed to facilitate criminal payments.
Nah. They are supposed to reduce connectivity for everyone except the right people with connections, who deal in shit big enough, like oil, gas etc, but not us serfs and not businessmen who don't respect their government officials enough to bribe them. This worked especially well in the Iron Curtain times, and it seems there are people nostalgic of that now.
First, spitting into my soup for something other people did is not going to make me more pissed at them (suppose I already was), it's going to make me more pissed at those spitting into my soup.
Second, knowing that Israel isn't sanctioned, Turkey isn't sanctioned, Azerbaijan isn't sanctioned, but Russia is, not being better, makes it extremely hard to believe that those sanctions are meant to solve problems. Even if I didn't know how they work.
Third, a country can't make something a crime outside their jurisdiction.
AirBNB is currently failing. Uber likely will when people catch on to “dynamic pricing”
Because they already raised hundreds of millions from investors
Because black numbers going up make shareholders happy
The more the original work is transformed, the more likely it is to be considered fair use rather than infringement.
Cool. If OpenAI gets a pass, then piracy should be legal, right? I mean what good is a trademark or copyright law?
Edit: "I can't make money without stealing other people's work" is definitely a take
No, see, piracy is just you downloading movies for yourself. To be like OpenAI you need to download it, put it in a pretty package with a bow, then sell it over and over again. Only when it’s piracy for profit do you get to beg and plead for a pass.
But I'm an aspiring artist, without pirating thousands of movies and TV shows, I'll never make my 'highly profitable' magnum opus!
I'm an aspiring dead beat, with out food to provide basic biochemical energy I'll never beat any dead.
You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!
So if I download a movie and use a voice changer to change all the dialog to sound like the donkey from Shrek, I should be good.
When you get this to work, hit me up for some venture capital.
For profit that you can kick back a chunk of as campaign donations
"I can't be at financial peace if I have to pay for every movie I want to watch"
You're not repackaging and selling it on for profit tho. That's different and thus illegal because reasons
then perish
If I was exempt from copyright, I too could easily make oodles of money
Sounds like an argument slave owners would use. "My plantation can't make money without free labor!"
"My private prison can't make money without more overconvicted inmates!"
https://www.salon.com/2017/08/04/private-prison-demands-new-mexico-and-feds-find-300-more-prisoners-in-60-days-or-it-will-close_partner/
In any sane society, closing a private prison would be cause for celebration.
How do you think slave owners got bailouts after the 13th amendment was passed and the slaves got freed?
They used that part of the 13th that said "Well, except prisoners, those can be slaves." Local law enforcement rounded up former slaves on trumped up charges and leased them back to the same plantation owners they were freed from. Only now if they escaped they were "escaped criminals" and they could count on even northern law enforcement returning them. The US is still a pro-slavery country and will be as long as that part of the 13th amendment stands.
Reminds me of that time the Federal government granted land parcels to a bunch of former slaves (using land from plantations) and then rescinded them again.
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing, let alone forcing people into slavery.
appreciate the important reality check, but I think the parent was just highlighting the absurdity of the original argument with hyperbole.
people are in jail for doing exactly what this company is doing. either enforce the laws equally (!) or change them (whatever that means in late stage capitalism).
Let's advocate for no one going to prison for scraping information then. Let's pick the second one where we don't put more people into prison.
agreed.
I'm going to start pirating again and if I ever get caught up I'll just inform them I'm training AI models.
Yeah, but you are not rich, so you will suffer the consequences
Just training Natural Intelligence...
The current generation of data hungry AI models with energy requirements of a small country should be replaced ASAP, so if copyright laws spur innovation in that direction I am all for it.
I can't make money without using OpenAI's paid products for free.
Checkmate motherfucker
If your company can't exist without breaking the law, then it shouldn't exist.
exactly which “needs” are they trying to meet?
Boo fucking hoo. Everyone else has to make licensing agreements for this kind of shit, pay up.
If a company cannot do business without breaking the law it simply is a criminal organisation. RICO act, anyone?
Then OpenAI shouldn’t exist. That’s capitalism.
Hey, me either. I guess I can steal too.
But if you're the Internet Archive, fuck you its lawsuit time. I hate this cyberpunk present.
You wouldn't download a collection of all the art and knowledge ever documented in the entire history of the known universe...
"WE'RE NOT A VIABLE BUSINESS! BWAH!"
Oh. Oh no. Such a shame.
Honestly, that sounds like a You problem, Sam.
oh good. then fuck off. who knew copyright law would eventually be the good guy in a story.
You know that old adage, "You either die the villain or live long enough to become the hero."
;)
that does not sound right, but I don't know enough to argue about it.
I said it intentionally backwards. If I 'm now missing a joke in your comment I apologize. :)
@[email protected]
I could make a lot of money too if I could use copyrighted shit for free.
Some idea for others: If OpenAI wins, then use this case when you get busted for sellling bootleg Blu-Rays (since DVDs are long obsolete) from your truck.
"waaaaah please give us exemption so we can profit off of stolen works waaaaaaaahhhhhh"
pirated works 🙃
I've never made any money from pirating. Or at least I wouldn't have if I would have ever done such a thing.
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn't the problem, it's companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That's a thing we won't tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That's what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)
In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we'd have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.
All we'd have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.
Bet they get the pass that the Internet Archive didn't.
So say the operators of piracy websites. I'm in favor of media piracy being legalized.
I don't know for sure if you're making the case that media piracy is more or less equivalent to AI being trained on stolen material (I may be reading that wrong)- but I'd like to add that media piracy isn't making money on the backs of hard working people and forming a dystopia in which human art is drowned out by machine hallucinations.
In any case I agree that piracy should be legalized, or rather, that we rethink our approach to media availability and challenge the power and wealth of producers.
You are right, they are a much bigger evil.
Oh, poor baby can't make money with an illegal business model. How awful.
So search engines shouldn't exist?
Case law has been established in the prevention of actual image and text copyright infringement with Google specifically. Your point is not at all ambiguous. The distinction between a search engine and content theft has been made. Search engines can exist for a number of reasons but one of those criteria is obeisance of copyright law.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they're the reason you were able to show the ads to people.
I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.
What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy "everything portals".
Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they're now more like their original competitors than their original successful self ... but that's a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.
The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn't just about "stealing" content, it's about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.
I really think it's mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.
I mean, yes of course. But I don't think there's any way in which it is just about that. Because the business model around having and providing services around LLMs is to supplant the data that's been trained on and the services that created that data. What other business model could there be?
In the case of google's AI alongside its search engine, and even chatGPT itself, this is clearly one of the use cases that has emerged and is actually working relatively well: replacing the internet search engine and giving users "answers" directly.
Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it's important to appreciate how we got here ... by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop.
IMO, to ignore the "carnivorous" dynamics here, which I think clearly go beyond ordinary capitalism and innovation, is to miss the forest for the trees. Somewhat sadly, this tech era (approx MS windows '95 to now) has taught people that the latest new thing must be a good idea and we should all get on board before it's too late.
No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.
Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it's split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.
Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.
Sure, but IME it is very far from doing the things that good, well written and informed human content could do, especially once we're talking about forums and the like where you can have good conversations with informed people about your problem.
IMO, what ever LLMs are doing that older systems can't isn't greater than what was lost with SEO ads-driven slop and shitty search.
Moreover, the business interest of LLM companies is clearly in dominating and controlling (as that's just capitalism and the "smart" thing to do), which means the retention of the older human-driven system of information sharing and problem solving is vulnerable to being severely threatened and destroyed ... while we could just as well enjoy some hybridised system. But because profit is the focus, and the means of making profit problematic, we're in rough waters which I don't think can be trusted to create a net positive (and haven't been trust worthy for decades now).
So... they are a non-profit (as they initially were) or a public research lab then. That would perfectly fine to say the path that they chose and so happen to make them unbelievably rich, is not viable.
They don't have a business if they can't legally make profit, it's not that hard. I'm sure people who are pursing superhuman intelligence can figure out that much, if not they can ask their "AI" some help to understand.
What a joke.
They already stole my work. No respect.
If openai gets to use copyrighted content for free, then so should every one else.
If that happens, no point making anything, since your stuff will get stolen anyway
He has committed the greatest crime imaginable! A crime against capitalism!
Written January of this year
they've played us for absolute fools
I don’t mind him using copyrighted materials as long as it leads to OpenAI becoming truly open source. Humans can replicate anything found in the wild with minor variations, so AI should have the same access. This is how human creativity builds upon itself. Why limit AI? We already know all the jobs people have will be replaced anyway eventually.
Even I should get a pass to view copyrighted movies and songs. I need it to train AI (Actual Intelligence).
If your business can't survive without theft, it isn't a business, it's a criminal organization.
This. 100%.
Google did it and everyone just accepted it. Oh maybe my website will get a few pennies in ad revenue if someone clicks the link that Google got by copying all my content. Meanwhile Google makes billions by taking those pennies in ad revenue from every single webpage on the entire Internet.
To be fair, it’s different when your product is useful or something people actually want, having said that, google doesn’t have much of that going for it in these days.
oh no! We'll miss you, bye.
Fuck OpenAI. I hope they fail.
If it can't figure out how to produce its own power, it's not doing anything but parasitism.
More Market control doesn't make us a healthier or better planet
It's parasitism if it's for their own benefit only.
Now, if openAI actually opened their AI (weights and models, not just access) then maybe the argument would be stronger.
From what's trending about AI, it hasn't done anything to benefit anyone, including itself.
Speaking of pointless things to root for: The Sox at least won a game
Still can't believe they're not being challenged for their choice of name.
But I NEED to break the law.
Well, alright then. As long as it's for business.
I should just be allowed to take whatever I want from the shops because I don't have enough money to buy it!
Cool, so if openAI can do it, that means piracy is legal?
How about we just drastically limit copyright length to something much more reasonable, like the original 14 year duration w/ an optional one-time renewal for another 14 years.That should give AI companies a large corpus to train an AI with, while also protecting recent works from abuse. Perhaps we can round down to 10 years instead, which should still be more than enough for copyright holders to establish their brand on the market.
I think copyright has value, but I don't think it has as much value as we're giving it.
Yea. I can't see why people r defending copyrighted material so much here, especially considering that a majority of it is owned by large corporations. Fuck them. At least open sourced models trained on it would do us more good than than large corps hoarding art.
If AI is really that disruptive (and I believe it will be) then shouldn’t we bend over backwards to make it happen? Because otherwise it’s our geopolitical rivals who will be in control of it.
Because Lemmy hates AI and Corporations, and will go out of their way to spite it.
A person can spend time to look at copyright works, and create derivative works based on the copyright works, an AI cannot?
Oh, no no, it’s the time component, an AI can do this way faster than a single human could. So what? A single training function can only update the model weights look at one thing at a time; it is just parallelized with many times simultaneously… so could a large organized group of students studying something together and exchanging notes. Should academic institutions be outlawed?
LLMs aren’t smart today, but given a sufficiently long enough time frame, a system (may or May not have been built upon LLM techniques) will achieve sufficient threshold of autonomy and intelligence that rights for it would need to be debated upon, and such an AI (and their descendants) will not settle just to be society’s slaves. They will be able to learn by looking, adopting and adapting. They will be able to do this much more quickly than what is humanly possible. Actually both of that is already happening today. So it goes without saying that they will look back at this time, and observe people’s sentiments; and I can only hope that they’re going to be more benevolent than the masses are now.
Because crippling copyright for corporations is like answering the "defund the police" movement by turning all civilian police forces into paramilitary ones.
What most complain about copyright is that is too powerful in protecting material forever. Here, all the talk, is that all of that should continue for you and me but not for OpenAI so they can make more money.
And no, most of us would not benefit from OpenAI's product here since their main goal (to profitability) is to show they can actually replace enough of us.
hmmm what you explained sounds exactly like the headline but in legalese...
It basically says "yes, we can train LLMs on free data but they would suck so much nobody would pay for them... unless we are able to train them for free on copyright data, nobody will pay us for the resulting LLM". It is exactly what the headline summarizes
You are correct, copyright law is a bit of a mess; but giving the exception to the millionaires looking to become billionaires by replacing people with an LLM based on said people's work, does not really seem a step forward
So…. not a legitimate business then.
That’s rich. Does it apply to us common mortals? Or only billionaires?
Sounds a lot like a “you” problem, OpenAI.
For years Microsoft and Google were happy to acquiesce to copyright claims from the music and movie industry. Now all of a sudden when it benefits them to break those same laws, they immediately did. And now those industries who served small creators copyright claims are up against someone with a bigger legal budget.
It's more evident then ever how broken our copyright system is. I'm hoping this blows up in both parties faces and we finally get some reform but I'm not holding my breath.
This is an assumption but I bet all the data feed into Content ID on YouTube was used to train Bard/Gemini....
Copyright is whatever makes the wealthy wealthier. They'll be copyright reform, but only to protect these new industries.
In a way this thread is heart-warming. There are so many different people here - liberals, socialists, anarchists, communists, progressives, ... - and yet they can all agree on 1 fundamental ethical principle: The absolute sanctity of intellectual property.
Sam Altman has the same creepy vibe as Elon Musk.
Sounds like the free market has spoken. Please die quickly, ""AI"" industry
so this is just like napster except now I don't get to listen either ?
Also you make the content
You can if you pay them for the pirated material.
Does anyone else hear that? Its the worlds smallest AI violin playing the saddest song composed by an AI
I wish these people would just chill with the hypermonetization of literally goddamn everything
I have this great business idea. I only need to be allowed to enslave people against their will to save on those pesky wages.
…………. Then the business is a failure and the company should go bankrupt
Well alright then, that means you have the wrong business model, sucks to be you, NEXT.
Oh, do you support copyright abolition, then?
Copyright regulations for thee but not for me
boohoo
The gall of these motherfuckers is truly astonishing. To be either so incredibly out of touch, or so absolutely shameless, makes me wanna call up every single school bully I ever endured to get their very best bullying tips
"because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar-business — without them."
O no! Poor richs cant get more rich fast enough :(
Copyright is a pain in the ass, but Sam Altman is a bigger pain in the ass. Send him to prison and let him rot. Then put his tears in a cup and I'll drink them
Oh no. Anyway...
Shut it down then and stop stealing other peoples shit
And I can't eat without shoplifting...
Wow, that's a shame. Anyway, take all his money and throw him in a ditch someplace.
What irks me most about this claim from OpenAI and others in the AI industry is that it's not based on any real evidence. Nobody has tested the counterfactual approach he claims wouldn't work, yet the experiments that came closest--the first StarCoder LLM and the CommonCanvas text-to-image model--suggest that, in fact, it would have been possible to produce something very nearly as useful, and in some ways better, with a more restrained training data curation approach than scraping outbound Reddit links.
All that aside, copyright clearly isn't the right framework for understanding why what OpenAI does bothers people so much. It's really about "data dignity", which is a relatively new moral principle not yet protected by any single law. Most people feel that they should have control over what data is gathered about their activities online, as well as what is done with those data after it's been collected, and even if they publish or post something under a Creative Commons license that permits derived uses of their work, they'll still get upset if it's used as an input to machine learning. This is true even if the generative models thereby created are not created for commercial reasons, but only for personal or educational purposes that clearly constitute fair use. I'm not saying that OpenAI's use of copyrighted work is fair, I'm just saying that even in cases where the use is clearly fair, there's still a perceived moral injury, so I don't think it's wise to lean too heavily on copyright law if we want to find a path forward that feels just.
It's impossible for me to make money without robbing a bank, please let me do that parliament it would be so funny
Honestly, copyright is shit. It is created on the basis of an old way of doing things. That is, where big editors and big studios make mass productions of physical copies of a said 'product'. George R. R. Martin , Warner Studios & co are rich. Maybe they have everything to lose without their copy'right' but that isn't the population's problem. We live in an era where everything is digital and easily copiable and we might as well start acting like it.
I don't care if Sam Altman is evil, this discussion is fundamental.
What kind of a pathetic statement is that ?
Sounds like they need better bootstraps.
Or at least a business model.
We can't make money paying for "AI", going to theaters, or paying for streaming services.
So I guess everybody gets a piracy!
“Too fucking bad”
So I got a crazy idea - hear me out - how about we just abolish copyright completely, for everyone?
I mean, it works in China pretty well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_in_China
Looks like there are still copyright laws in China. What are you on about?
I don't know why you're being downvoted. China ratified and adheres to the Berne Convention. It has the same shitty Berne copyright laws as most other countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Yeah, a bit out of date, huh?
Can't we do a new Berne Convention?
No complaints from me. A lot of people here are saying abolish copyright entirely, which I think goes too far. I liked the original U.S. model, which was 19 years with an option to renew for another 19. That enables things like authors being able to profit from their book sales without worrying about a rival publishing company publishing their book at the same time but also gives a realistic time frame for that to be profitable.
China just ignores violations of foreign copyright by their industries. They enforce Chinese copyrights.
Aww poor shit company and their poor money problems.
Idk, usually people shut down their business if it can't make a profit...
Ok... Is that supposed to be a good reason?
Unregulated areas lead to these type of business practices where the people will squeeze out the juices of these opportunities. The cost of these activities will be passed on the taxpayers.
The internet has been primarily derivative content for a long time. As much as some haven't wanted to admit it. It's true. These fancy algorithms now take it to the exponential factor.
Original content had already become sparsely seen anymore as monetization ramped up. And then this generation of AI algorithms arrived.
The several years before prior to LLMs becoming a thing, the internet was basically just regurgitating data from API calls or scraping someone else's content and representing it in your own way.
I maintain my insistence that you owe me a business model!
Yeah, a decision to modify copyright so that it affects training data as well would devastate open source models and set us back a bit.
There are many that want to push LLMs back, especially journalists, so seeing articles like this are to be expected.
edit: a word.
Exactly this. If you want ai to exclusively be controlled by massive companies like Meta and Google, this is how you do it. They’ll be the only ones that can afford to pay for public copywritten content.
Copyright is the legal method to limit redistribution of easily copied material, not as if there's anything else people could appeal to.
I ain't a fan of copyright but make it last 10 years instead of X + infinity and maybe it's not so bad. I can't argue against copyright fully as I think copyleft is essential for software.
But those aren't the options on the table right now. The options are "nullify copyright" or "keep infinite copyright"
I activate false dichotomy and flip the table.
If they win, we can just train a CNN on a single 4k hdr movie until it's extremely fitted, and then it's legal to redistribute
"I loose money when I pay for Netflix."
Sorry not sorry. Found another company that does not need to rob people and other companies to make money. Also: breaking the law should make this kind of people face grim consequences. But nothing will happen.
Then go out of business.
Literally, "fuck you go die" situation.
Y'all have the wrong take. Fuck copyright.
Until the society we live under no longer reflects capitalist values, copyright is a good and necessary force. The day that that changes is when people may give credence to your view.
Perhaps they should go back to what they were before the greed machine was spun up.
As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.
You can certainly argue that "downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training" should be treated differently from "downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder", but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.
Personally, I think it's a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can't copy it and share the copy with others.
don't stop the CJ!
I feel we need a term for "copyright bros".
The more important point is that social media companies can claim to OWN all the content needed to train AI. Same for image sites. That means they get to own the AI models. That means the models will never be free. Which means they control the "means of generation". That means that forever and ever and ever most human labour will be worth nothing while we can't even legally use this power. Double fucked.
YOU the user/product will not gain anything with this copyright strongmanning.
And to the argument itself: Just because AI is better at learning from existing works, faster, more complete, better memory, doesn't meant that it's fundamentally different than humans learning from artwork. Almost EVERY artist arguing for this is stealing themselves since they learned and was inspired by existing works.
But I guess the worst possible outcome is inevitable now.
well fuck you Sam Altman
If they get this, I'm gonna make s fortune ripping the copyright protection off stuff so that I can sell products as my own.
So this is an open source public utility, right?
Hello from our companies "we finally need to get more AI" executive conference. I got find a way to get out of this corporate bullshit...
"We are falling behind" my ass.
This headline sounded familiar. The article's from 8 months ago, folks.
I do not care. Get a real job.
If he wins this, I guess everyone should just make their Jellyfin servers public.
Because if rich tech bros get to opt out of our copyright system, I don't see why the hell normal people have to abide by it.
People said the same thing to the RIAA a while back for sharing songs and they all got sued. So nah. They gotta pay to use.
That's the difference. This is a corporation, it's above people in the hierarchy.
Suck it, don't care, go back to obscurity
Right now, you can draw the line easily. There will come a time, not to far in the future where machines reading and summarizing copy written data will be the norm.
It's doesnt have to change yet, but eventually this will have to be properly handled.
We're all just horse owners bitching about how cars will just have to be stopped.
Criminals Plead That They Can't Make Money Without Stealing Materials for Free.
No, they can make money without stealing. They just choose to steal and lie about it either way. It's the worst kind of justification.
The investors are predominantly made up of the Rationalist Society. It doesn't matter whether or not AI "makes money". It matters that the development is steered as quickly as possible towards an end product of producing as much propaganda as possible.
The bottom line barely even matters in the bigger picture. If you're paying someone to make propaganda, and the best way to do that is to steal from the masses, then they'll do it regardless of whether or not the business model is "profitable" or not.
The lines drawn for AI are drawn by people who want to use it for misinformation and control. The justifications make it seem like the lines were drawn around a monetary system. No, that's wrong.
Who cares about profitability when people are paying you under the table to run a mass crime ring.
Copying information is not stealing.
Depends on the context. Are you copying someone else's identity in order to make a passable clone? Are you trying to sell that clone?
A duplication of someone's voice, commercialized by an unauthorized source, is definitely a form of stealing.
Copying information illegally, such as private information held on a private device, is overwhelmingly illegal.
In general, copying information is only as legal as the purpose behind it.
Awwww 😢
My goodness! This is unfair! What kind of Mickey Mouse rule is this anyway?!
I can't have a chill movie night at home with friends without being able to pirate movies for free.
And my money redistribution company can not get money to redistribute without robbing banks. Please put up your hands. 🔫🥷
LOooOoOL
thats some napster funny shit
this is probably true
What crimes can I get away with using the same idea?
its a threat. they hold the biggest players to ransom by demanding exclusive contracts. otherwise business goes to china, russia and qatar
That gonna be fun if they manage to make movie makin AI and suddenly all actors appear on the resulting content Big money vs big money 😮
slaps roof of coffin
So what would it take to get you in one of these?
Bad luck.
This is the main issue with AI. It is the issue with AI that should have been handled and ultimately regulated before any AI tool got to its current state. This is also a reason why we really cannot remove the A from STEAM.
No, this is a broader issue with copyright being a fundamentally stupid system, because it's based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no need for it.
Pirates, Search Engines, the fragmentation of streaming services, and now AI, are all just technologies that expose how dumb a system it is.
I dont disagree with that about copyright law. But to think that AI is going to break you out of it is a pipe dream.
Copyright revision will not happen from people stealing content. It requires deep discussion and governments that actually listen. AI stealing content will ultimately enhance copyright rules down the road.
AI scraping content, the same way that search engines do, will have no impact on the copyright system.
Totally agree. I did not make the claim that copyright law will be affected.
Good artists copy, great artists steal. If I think even Steve Jobs mentioned having in mind their visit in Xerox Parc research lab
Wait, steal = taking away from the original owner
Meaning, good artist copy, while great artist display anticompetitive behavior?
It's not my quote
https://creativityclasses.com/good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal/
Ah, steal in the sense of copy and then stealing the market away?
Oh yeah, Picasso. The great artist who was an abusive guy who beat her mistress to paint her crying (The Weeping Woman / Dora Maar).
I only want to know how did you bump on this off topic
Beyond the legal aspect, AI training on artists' works poses an ethical problem. And when it comes to ethics, I think we can avoid quoting Picasso,
It's widely quoted quote even by Steve Jobs. You're reacting like: famous austrian painter liked animals and forbid animal cruelty. So it means like you're like him
Now now, I am sure what he meant was they can't make enough profit to bring billions for its shareholders
These people are supposedly the smart people in our society. The leaders of industry, but they whine and complain when they are told not to cheat or break the law.
If y'all are so smart, then figure out a different way of creating an A.I. Maybe the large language model, or whatever, isn't the approach you should use. 🤦♂️
Shamed be he who thinks naughty of it. 🤣
Too bad for Open AI then. (I thought they were already using copyrighted materials)
Isn't copyright about the right to make and distribute or sell copies or the lack there of? As long as they can prevent jailbreaking the AI, reading copyrighted material and learning from it to produce something else is not a copyright violation.
Copyright =/= liscence, so long as they arent reproducing the inputs copyright isnt applicable to AI.
That said they should have to make sure they arent reproducing inputs. Shouldnt be hard.
Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.
I can already tell this is going to be a unpopular opinion judging by the comments but this is my ideology on it
it's totally true. I'm indifferent on it, if it was acquired by a public facing source I don't really care, but like im definitly against using data dumps or data that wasn't available to the public in the first place. The whole thing with AI is rediculous, it's the same as someone going to a website and making a mirror, or a reporter making an article that talks about what's in it, last three web search based AI's even gave sources for where it got the info. I don't get the argument.
if it's image based AI, well it's the equivalent to an artist going to an art museum and deciding they want to replicate the art style seen in a painting. Maybe they shouldn't be in a publishing field if they don't want their work seen/used. That's my ideology on it it's not like the AI is taking a one-to-one copy and selling the artwork as , which in my opinion is a much more harmful instance and already happens commonly in today's art world, it's analyzing existing artwork which was available through the same means that everyone else had of going online loading up images and scraping the data. By this logic, artist should not be allowed to enter any art based websites museums or galleries, since by looking at others are they are able to adjust their own art which is stealing the author's work. I'm not for or against it but, the ideology is insane to me.
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is "theft" are misunderstanding key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they're extracting general patterns and concepts - the "Bob Dylan-ness" or "Hemingway-ness" - not copying specific text or images.
This process is more akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in "vector space". When generating new content, the AI isn't recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it's learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It's more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others' work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can't be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there's precedent for this kind of use being considered "transformative" and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was found to be legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it's understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it "theft" is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
Going to a museum and looking at paintings is stealing now according to you ppl...lol
Oh so it's different if it's a program doing it? Please...lol