The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work - eviltoast

Millions of articles from The New York Times were used to train chatbots that now compete with it, the lawsuit said.

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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?

      • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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            10 months ago

            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.

            • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              The best case scenario here is that LLMs become easily accessible and are largely unmonetized.

              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?

              nor are the models trained on things like news articles but instead look more like the OpenAssistant dataset

              Why?

              Edit: jk I’m gaslighting you because I’m a corporate plant. Trickle down trickle down Ronald Reagan is God

              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:

              I really don’t understand your argument.

              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.