OpenAI has publicly responded to a copyright lawsuit by The New York Times, calling the case “without merit” and saying it still hoped for a partnership with the media outlet.
In a blog post, OpenAI said the Times “is not telling the full story.” It took particular issue with claims that its ChatGPT AI tool reproduced Times stories verbatim, arguing that the Times had manipulated prompts to include regurgitated excerpts of articles. “Even when using such prompts, our models don’t typically behave the way The New York Times insinuates, which suggests they either instructed the model to regurgitate or cherry-picked their examples from many attempts,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI claims it’s attempted to reduce regurgitation from its large language models and that the Times refused to share examples of this reproduction before filing the lawsuit. It said the verbatim examples “appear to be from year-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites.” The company did admit that it took down a ChatGPT feature, called Browse, that unintentionally reproduced content.
The problem is not that it’s regurgitating. The problem is that it was trained on NYT articles and other data in violation of copyright law. Regurgitation is just evidence of that.
Its not clear that training on copyrighted material is in breach of copyright. It is clear that regurgitating copyrighted material is in breach of copyright.
There hasn’t been a court ruling in the US that makes training a model on copyrighted data any sort of violation. Regurgitating exact content is a clear copyright violation, but simply using the original content/media in a model has not been ruled a breach of copyright (yet).
True. I fully expect that the court will rule against OpenAI here, because it very obviously does not meet any fair use exemption.
For that to work, NYT has to prove OpenAI is copying their words verbatim, not just their style.
If the AI isn’t outputting a string of words that can be found on an NYT article, they don’t stand a chance
Tell me you haven’t actually read legal opinions on the subject without telling me…
I’m not aware of any federal case law on copyright and AI. Happy to read some if you have a suggestion.
Case law hasn’t been defined yet, but lawyers who have litigated copyright or worked at the office have written on the topic:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/how-we-think-about-copyright-and-ai-art-0
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU03/20230517/115951/HHRG-118-JU03-Wstate-DamleS-20230517.pdf
Training on copyrighted data should be allowed as long as it’s something publicly posted.
Only if the end result of that training is also something public. OpenAI shouldn’t be making money on anything except ads if they’re using copyright material without paying for it.
I was trained on copyrighted material… I guess I should work for free
Why an exception for ads if you’re going that route? Wouldn’t advertisers deserve the same protections as other creatives?
Personally, since they’re not making copies of the input (beyond what’s transiently required for processing), and they’re not distributing copies, I’m not sure why copyright would come into play.
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