Astounding. IMHO the biggest achievement wasn't technical at all--it was how they were all able to do this gigantic end-run around copywrite, trademark, or patent protections.
Essentially, there is no such thing as intellectual property anymore.
If AI means the freeing us all from living under the thumb of the current copyright cartel, I'd be dancing for joy. The tiny handful of powerful media conglomerates that sue 12 year olds for sharing a song, take down criticism by abusing automated DMCA systems for obvious fair use and use their monopolistic power to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else in society should be dismantled.
Of course, in practice, I'm sure the lobbyists from the major copyright profiteers are already working to make sure they get unjustly paid and fair use for regular citizens gets further eroded.
It's dumbfounding to watch everyone equate piracy with hollywood movies, while the real innovators and scientists get thrown under the bus by theivery.
It is order of magnitudes more difficult to spend 10years studying something when your work can be stolen and reproduced at any moment.
The world is broken and ctrl c, ctrl v broke it.
Don't expect einstein level scientists and their downstream products that started the computer revolution... you killed the protections needed for the people that made it, cause you wanted movies for free.
It's insanity.
Could I host a Hollywood movie on my personal website? Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel? If not, then intellectual property obviously still exists.
Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side. It just makes claims about AI training overstepping IP boundaries seem illegitimate.
Why not? E.g., chagGpt 3.5, if you ask what the first paragraph of "Moby Dick" is, it prints it out verbatim. How is that not reselling somebody else's IP?
If you ask it to print out the entire book of "Green Eggs and Ham" it dutifully says it can't because of copywrite restrictions. HOWEVER, you can ask it to print out the nth page, and it will happily print it out, for all 1 <= n<= #pages in book.
It snorked up Dr. Suisses IP, and is reselling it to us.
> Could I take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as my own novel?
Well, I asked chatGtp to print out the first paragraph of Harry Potter, and it did, but said that it might violate copywright.... LLMs are quite "self aware" (for want of a better word) that they have appropriated copywrited IP. It will still sell it back to us.
LLMs are a compressed representation of the training set.
So...in answer to your question, no, you cannot take the text of "Harry Potter" and sell it as your own content. But chatGtp sure can!!!!!
> Inaccurate hyperbole doesn't help your side.
sigh yes, its important not to overstate your case. Let me try again: Intellectual Property Laws are for plebs like us. OpenAI and its cohorts, however, have found a way to rip off, repackage, and resell any IP they want to.
And all this fuss over how dangerous AI, and how it should be regulated, etc, is just a false flag to distract us from the real issues.
* Is the literal act of copying data to the hard drives used in model training fair use?
* Is the act of training using the data count as a performance of the work? (This one likely not because there's no human being performed to.)
* Are the resultant model weights considered a derivative work of some or all copyrighted works in the training set?
* Does a model reproducing some or all of a copyrighted work count as a performance? Does transmitting it as an API response? Does hosting it in the conversion history?
* If the answer to the above is yes who has done copying? OpenAI or the user? What situations is it one, the other, or both?
Nothing says you can't acquire data with reckless abandon, and use it to train your AI which would be fair use. I would love to see someone get sued for piracy and mount a defense that they were torrenting to gather data for AI training and see how it goes.
ChatGPT is a machine built and operated by humans. If ChatGPT infringes copyright, then it is those humans who own and operate it who are infringing.
The fact that they built a complex obfuscated system that stores many copyrighted works in a novel way (model weights) and reproduces them incompletely or unpredictably when asked, doesn’t change the fact that they have built a system whose purpose is to infringe copyright.
It’s a little bit like saying I started the car running and let it drive off on its own accord in front of a huge crowd of people, I’m not responsible for the deaths because it was the car that ran them over and the car doesn’t have agency. The car wasn’t designed to kill and never intended to kill. But it’s still me who operates the car and should have foreseen the obvious consequences.
I don’t buy into any of these arguments that just because ChatGPT is very complex or mysterious that somehow the humans who built or are running it aren’t responsible for its actions.
Interesting. Why do you feel as though this is the proper analogy, rather than being the car manufacturer who builds the car which could be used in this way?
What about a car manufacturer who knowingly does not put in a widget to ensure the car is never allowed to exceed the speed limit? Or does not install a breathalyser which drivers need to blow into in order to start the car?
It's also worth noting that simply reproducing copyrighted material is not necessarily an infringement of that copyright, and in most jurisdictions, it depends on the purpose the reproduction is intended to serve.
For example, the copyright on the book may have expired. Or it could be fair use (however that's defined in the user's jurisdiction). Or the user of ChatGPT may have a physical copy of the book and lives in a jurisdiction where this allows them to obtain a digital copy.
You are way overthinking it. Take my example of "Sam I Am" by Dr. Suess. I can buy access to chatGPT, and With the right prompts I can get it to print out every page of that book.
How is this different from somebody selling photocopies of the book in front of Barnes and Noble?
It doesn't matter what storage method or media is used. You can use a database, an LLM, translate it to swahili and back to english, whatever. If you can get somebody's IP without paying them, then axiomatically, indeed oxymoronically, their IP has been stolen.
If intellectual property has the potential to threaten our survival, and I sincerely believe that it already is doing so, then we must dissolve every single piece of it, and make it a common good for all.
However, eventually, YouTube had to issue endless EULA-violations and copywrite takedowns...and the free ride was over.
Maybe if YouTube had convinced everybody that its tech was an existential threat, governments would still be debating about what regulations should be enacted, instead of enforcing IP laws on YouTube....
Just underscores what a GENIUS move it was for OpenAI to hype-up the existential threat angle. It got everybody scared, and when you are scared, your reasoning is impaired, and you start making dumb decisions. Just brilliant...
If only