325
The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
325 points (96.3% liked)
News
22908 readers
3408 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Why would the NYT pay the authors again?
I don't see why we would be better off if the NYT and other newspapers get a windfall profit. I don't see the reasoning here at all.
ETA: 6 downvotes so far. Would anyone mind explaining what the problem is? I'm not lying when I say that I don't see it.
The NYT as a company is much closer to its authors than AI is to its authors. When it exercises copyright, the owners of those copyrights are the NYT, but the authors are the ... Well, authors. You're right that a victory means newspapers get a lot more money.
... But would that be a bad thing? If newspapers become more profitable again, maybe we can see a resurgence of local papers and more reliable news. Instead of MSNBC and Fox and CNN, various papers could be our main media sources.
In any case -- there's times when business interests align with employee interests, and this is one of them. The NYT is effectively saying with this lawsuit that OpenAI et al. have been stealing from them, and by proxy, the authors. A victory in this court case would strengthen author rights and ownership. A loss would mean big corporations can take anything made by the public, use it for their AI, and then charge money for it. The training materials have a quantifiable value in what a trained model sells for versus an untrained model.
Ok, I see. It's "trickle-down economics". Sorry, if you don't like the term. Feel free to suggest a better one.
The simple fact is, it won't work.
There is no reason for the NYT, or any other newspaper, to share the profit. I'm not saying that none of the owners will, but most won't. Even the generous ones won't bother tracking down former employees or their heirs. In fairness, that's not economics. It's just an observation about how people behave. I do note, though, that you are not actually claiming that the authors will get paid.
It won't make newspapers more profitable, either. The owners of old newspapers will be able to extract a rent for their archives. But where would the extra cash flow for a new newspaper come from? You could say that they have a new potential buyer. But the US population is growing and every new person in the US is a new potential buyer. Every new business is a potential new advertising client. Having a new potential buyer is just not going to make the difference. Although, I do note that you are not actually claiming that this would make newspapers more profitable.
At least I can say that in the last paragraph, you are wrong:
No. It will not strengthen authors. Strengthening ownership strengthens owners. Strengthening ownership of buildings, strengthens landlords and does not strengthen construction workers. They have already been paid in full.
I don't know if the poster, I originally replied to, agrees with you, but I can definitely say that I simply do not share your ideology. I hold the view that intellectual property is a privilege granted by society, for the benefit of society. Call that socialism if you like, it's in the US Constitution. OTOH, You clearly believe that IP entitles someone to a benefit from society, regardless of any harm to society. I don't know if you believe in these suggested trickle-down benefits. I find it disturbing that you actually did not go so far as to make a definitive claim.
If IP is freely given to AI developers, and the AI they create is freely given to the public, I have no issue at all. In fact, I'd love for that to happen. What I don't want is what you describe at the end -- companies use public and freely given IP to create a closed product sold for profit. And that's exactly what I see these AI as. As long as they have a premium model, they're benefiting from society and profiting privately.
I think we actually agree on a fundamental level what the ideal situation and dynamic should be. I just think the NYT winning the court case brings us closer to that ideal. And I think we both detest the idea of OpenAI getting rich off of other people.
I really doubt we agree on any level. You're pitching a neo-feudal hellhole. I don't know if you believe that you will be one of the lucky few, or if you believe that the magic of the market will fix things. If it's the former, then play the lottery instead. If it's the latter, then you are just wrong. If you believe that you are just arguing for good ole American capitalism, then you are deluding yourself. This is the kind of nonsense that was abolished at the birth of the US, or any other developed nation. It won't work. Never has, never will.
We agree that information should be freely given and provided to create products that are freely given and provided. We agree that it's bad for information to be freely given to create products which are sold for private gain.
I'm not sure you're understanding what I'm saying. Do you disagree with any of the above? When it comes to this specific court case, either the NYT will win or OpenAI will win, and I'm saying the NYT winning is the better of the two outcomes. I'm not saying it's the ideal we aspire to by any means.
Pretty sure you were downvoted because it looks like you've misunderstood. The NYT do, in fact, pay their authors.
Yes, which is why I have trouble understanding what you wrote earlier: "If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight and we’ll have to rebuild it from scratch either with a new business model that pays authors[...]".
Why would the NYT pay the authors again when their archive is used for AI training?
I don't think NYT contributors should expect a payday out of this but the precedent set may mean that they could expect some royalties for future work that they own outright. The precedent is really the important part here and this will definitely not be the only suit.
Ok. Then it's not about authors, but about copyright owners. Bit misleading to talk about authors, then.
FWIW it wouldn't work. The NYT and other newspapers have their whole archives to sell. A few months of a daily newspaper is more than even someone like Stephen Kind has published in his entire life. It's not even worth negotiating about such a tiny amount of writing. At best, you could do like with stock photography. They upload their texts to some website and accept whatever terms are offered. It might be a good business for some middle-men.
A prolific amateur might find it a welcome bit of extra cash. But the story doesn't stop there.
The extra costs must be passed on to the user. You transfer wealth from the public to a few large-scale owners, aka rich people. And since these AIs are text generators, you can expect that actual authors will bear the brunt of that.
Do you think trickle down has ever worked?
Why do you keep trying to make this about trickle down? That's not even sort of relevant to what's going on here.
My preferred solution actually has these models being trained on crowd sourced open datasets and these models are primarily locally run.
Are you seriously trying to gaslight me? Like I can't still read your original post...
Sure, you didn't say "trickle down". Call it whatever you like. It doesn't change the facts.
I really don't understand your argument. The best case scenario here is that LLMs become easily accessible and are largely unmonetized. That is OpenAI does not sell usage of the model nor are the models trained on things like news articles but instead look more like the OpenAssistant dataset (no relation to OpenAI).
Instead LLMs are strictly a conversational interface for interacting with arbitrary systems. My understanding of the limitations of this technology (I work in this space) means that's the only thing we can ever hope for them to do in a resource efficient way. OpenAI and co have largely tried to obfuscate this fact for the purpose of maintaining our reliance on them for things that should be happening locally.
Edit: jk I'm gaslighting you because I'm a corporate plant. Trickle down trickle down Ronald Reagan is God
Edit 2: To add a little bit of context, OpenAI's business model currently consists of burning money and generating hype. A ruling against them would destroy them financially as the there's no way theyd be able to pay for all of their training data on top of the money they're already using.
So basically, like Bing Chat is now, except that MS should not have to reciprocate to OpenAI. But why shouldn't the engineers and scientists at OAI be paid?
Why?
I'm sorry if I have offended your republican (or libertarian or whatever) sensibilities, but these economic ideas just don't work for a nation on the whole. Make your argument if you have one.
First sentence last:
It's probably because we have very different values and simply disagree on what should be achieved. I hold the view that intellectual property is a privilege granted by the nation, for the benefit of the nation. Call that socialism if you like, it’s in the US Constitution.
That said, if you really believe that it will benefit authors if the NYT gets its wish to expand copyright, you are just wrong. I will gladly flesh out the explanation if the logic is unclear.