There are an alarming number of responses seemingly completely unaware of the core thrust of the article (and NYT lawsuit). ChatGPT was able to reproduce and publish significant portions of NYT articles, completely verbatim for hundred-to-thousand word stretches.
It’s not derivative work. We’re way past that. NYT has an exceptionally strong case here and anyone arguing about the merits of copyright is way off the mark. This court case is not going single-handedly to undo copyright. OpenAI has very little going for them other than “this is new, how were we to know it could do this”. So knowing that, the currently trained models are in a very sticky situation.
Further, I don’t see NYT settling. The implications are too large, and if they settle with OpenAI, they will have a similar case pop up with every other model. And every other publisher of digital content with have a similarly merited case. This is an inflection point for generative AI, and it’s looking like it will be either much more expensive or much more limited than we originally thought.
A side effect of this: I am predicting that we will start to see a rise in “pirate” models. Models who eschew all legality, who are trained in a distributed fashion, and whose weights are published not by corporations but by collectives (e.g. torrent models). There is a good chance we see these surpass the official “well behaved” models in effectiveness. It will be an interesting next few years to see this play out.
It’s not derivative work. We’re way past that. NYT has an exceptionally strong case here and anyone arguing about the merits of copyright is way off the mark. This court case is not going single-handedly to undo copyright. OpenAI has very little going for them other than “this is new, how were we to know it could do this”. So knowing that, the currently trained models are in a very sticky situation.
Further, I don’t see NYT settling. The implications are too large, and if they settle with OpenAI, they will have a similar case pop up with every other model. And every other publisher of digital content with have a similarly merited case. This is an inflection point for generative AI, and it’s looking like it will be either much more expensive or much more limited than we originally thought.
A side effect of this: I am predicting that we will start to see a rise in “pirate” models. Models who eschew all legality, who are trained in a distributed fashion, and whose weights are published not by corporations but by collectives (e.g. torrent models). There is a good chance we see these surpass the official “well behaved” models in effectiveness. It will be an interesting next few years to see this play out.