It always should have had the right business model where they paid for this access for AI training. They knew it was wrong but in their rush to be known they decided it was better to take without asking and then ask for forgiveness later. Regardless what happens now, people have already made a name for themselves swindling the likes of Microsoft out of it and will have long well-paying careers from it.

If this is ruled as not fair use then the whole industry will basically disappear overnight

Nah, most of these companies have more than enough of their own users to mine data from.

These models can still be trained on data that they're allowed to use, but I think that what we're seeing is that the better LLM services are probably trained with shocking amounts of private data, whereas the less performant probably don't use stolen data.

It certainly seems illegal, but if it is, then all search engines are too. They do the same thing. Search engines copy everything to their internal servers, index it, then sell access to that copyrighted data (via ads and other indirect revenue generators).

If the companies can profit of stealing work and charging access for it, why can't I just pirate it myself without making anyone richer?

I'm glad you bring up Google Books in this. Those lawsuits in the early teens about this issue are really important. But two things bother me: Google really won the case, but then basically abandoned the project. It's still there, but a shell of what it used to be. I wonder if the case may be, even though they won, they really lost. Or it could be Google just abandoning another project because they never cared about it.

I think AI for searching books like Google books would be an a amazing use case, and really, it is t that much different than what Google books is: an index of all of the published words. In fact, I can imagine AI being able to help you figure out if this book has the info you actually need from the book. That's not what GPT is, but one could make one that could do it.

I am torn. I am sort of a GPT may sayer, but on the other hand, is it really all that philosophically different than what humans do? I don't think it is materially different, but it is a little.

I have to say it's fun to watch. I'm bringing this up with my boss when he's back because all fortune 500 companies are big on both products right now and from a technology perspective and a business edge with their competitors it makes sense.

For me I care more from a philosophical and moral perspective and I'm curious with our "AI Steering Committee" how seriously they're taking into account the actions of these companies. Microsoft is one thing as they're so embedded but OpenAI? How long does a company wanting to be perceived as "good" going to continue using ChatGPT?

I don't have answers. Genuinely curious.

On the one hand it should be a copyright violation but if it is then Google search, and all search engines are too.

The only reason you can search for an article and get a hit is Google already read the page and copied it all to it's internal servers where everything is indexed. So when you search, Google can look up the keywords and provide you a link.

If there was a bug in Google's search engine like OpenAI's, you could craft a query that would leak Google's indexed data.

So all search engines are the same copyright violators as OpenAI. They take data from everyone and profit from it.(even if it is indirect or paying salaries)

The thing is these are two separate arguments.

One is whether or not training is infringement.

The other is whether or not there needs to be stricter filters on output to avoid copyright.

The second one is easy to both argue for and implement, it just means funneling money towards a fine tuned RAG model to detect infringement before spitting out content. I'd expect we'll be seeing that in the near future. It's similar to the arguments YouTube was doomed at its acquisition because of rampant copyright infringement, but they just created a tagging system and now people complain about over-zealous DCMA enforcement - generative AI will end up in the same place with the same results for cloud-based models.

The first is much more murky, and I'm extremely skeptical that the suits regarding it will be successful given the degree of transformation and the relative scope of the material in any given suit compared to the total training set. As well the purpose of the laws in the first place were to encourage creation, and setting back arguably the most powerful creative tool in history (particularly when it means likely being eclipsed by other nation states with different attitudes towards IP) doesn't seem all that encouraging.

If I were putting money on it, we'll see multiple rulings against training as infringement which will settle the issue, but we will see "copyright detection as a service" models pretty much everywhere for a short period until suddenly the use of generative AI by creatives is so widespread that its being unable to be copyrighted means business models shift from media as a product to a service.

In a perfect world, yes, I think AIs can and should be trained on real world content, but if those AIs still don’t understand the nuances of attribution, paraphrasing, and plagiarism, then that’s still a problem that needs to be addressed.

What a joke. Oh okay, if the LLMs output can annotate where the snippets came from, then it's totally cool.

The fuck are we doing? We're really sleepwalking into a future where a few companies are able to slurp up the entire history of human creative thought, crunch some statistics about it with the help of severely underpaid Kenyans, and put a paywall around it, and that's totally legal.

Every time I see an "AI" (these are not fucking AI, and yet we're fucking doomed already) apologist, I always think of Peter Gibbons explaining the "fractions of a penny" scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo

"It becomes ours"

Are we really this dumb? Maybe we deserve the dystopia we're building.