326
The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 12 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Digital computer-aided plagiarism is new ground for copyright. Google has successfully defended Google Books with the defense that it is searching an archive of legally purchased and licensed books for specific information without reproducing the entire work. It's the equivalent of visiting a physical library or bookstore and flipping through a book without actually purchasing it.

AI is something else entirely. It's more like a program that incorporates ALL of the text (training data) and alters it according to an algorithm. This has been a problem with news-crawling websites for a long time. They would download copywritten text, edit multiple sources together, or use an algorithm to replace common words, etc., then post it on their own ad (and often virus) filled sites. It seems like AI is just a more sophisticated version of that. In any case, I'm not a lawyer so who knows what the argument will be on one side or the other.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    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.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent