The transformation doesn’t matter if it was illegally obtained in the first place. They published thier material for human consumption, not as AI feedstock. The problem for Microsoft is that the only thing special about chatgpt 4 is the amount of feedstock, and if they have to buy the rights to it suddenlyp putting half the internet into Siri and selling the result doesn’t seem so brilliant anymore.
I don’t think that the content was illegally obtained, unless there’s some law out there that prevents you from using a crawler to automatically retrieve text. And probably there’s no law against using data intended for human consumption to feed AI.
There is also no law stating that copyright doesn’t apply to training AI in the same way it applies to every other use. Even this comment technically has a copyright, in the same way that people who write long original stories on forums like Spacebattles and Sufficent Velocity post by post still have a copyright on that story.
There is a carve out in copyright for academic research, but that protection disappears the second you start using it for a commercial purpose.
Now I get it. And yes, now I agree with you; it would give them a bit more merit to claim that the data being used in the input was obtained illegally. (Unless Meta has right of use to ThePile.)
The link does not mention GPT (OpenAI, Microsoft) or LaMDA/Bard (Google, Alphabet), but if Meta is doing it odds are that the others are doing it too.
Sadly this would be up to the copyright holders of this data. It does not apply to NYT content that you can freely access online, for NYT it got to be about the output, not the input.
The transformation doesn’t matter if it was illegally obtained in the first place. They published thier material for human consumption, not as AI feedstock. The problem for Microsoft is that the only thing special about chatgpt 4 is the amount of feedstock, and if they have to buy the rights to it suddenlyp putting half the internet into Siri and selling the result doesn’t seem so brilliant anymore.
I don’t think that the content was illegally obtained, unless there’s some law out there that prevents you from using a crawler to automatically retrieve text. And probably there’s no law against using data intended for human consumption to feed AI.
As such, I might be wrong but I think that the only issue is that this data is being used to output derivative works, and acc. to NYT in some instances “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”
They’ve generally been pretty open about using pirated books and data to train their product on.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/
There is also no law stating that copyright doesn’t apply to training AI in the same way it applies to every other use. Even this comment technically has a copyright, in the same way that people who write long original stories on forums like Spacebattles and Sufficent Velocity post by post still have a copyright on that story.
There is a carve out in copyright for academic research, but that protection disappears the second you start using it for a commercial purpose.
Now I get it. And yes, now I agree with you; it would give them a bit more merit to claim that the data being used in the input was obtained illegally. (Unless Meta has right of use to ThePile.)
The link does not mention GPT (OpenAI, Microsoft) or LaMDA/Bard (Google, Alphabet), but if Meta is doing it odds are that the others are doing it too.
Sadly this would be up to the copyright holders of this data. It does not apply to NYT content that you can freely access online, for NYT it got to be about the output, not the input.