OpenAI being Sued for "Stealing" Peoples Content Online

"Massive Trouble"

Step 1 - Scrape everyone's data to make your LLM and make a high profile deal worth $10B

Step 2 - Get sued by everyone whose data you scraped

Step 3 - Settle and everyone in the class will be eligible for $5 credit using ChatGPT-4

Step 4 - Bask in the influx of new data

Step 5 - Profit

i posted on the public internet with the intent and understanding that it would be crawled by systems for all kinds of things. if i dont want content to be grabbed i dont publish it publicly
you can't easily have it both ways imo. even with systems that do strong pki if you want the world in general to see it you are giving up a certain amount of control over how the content gets used.
law does not really matter here as much as people would like to try to apply it, this is simply how public content will be used. Go post in a garden if you don't want to get scrapped, just remember the corollary is your reach, your voice is limited to the walls of that garden.
- What you said makes a lot of sense. But here's the catch: it assumes OpenAI checked the licensing for all the stuff they grabbed. And I can guarantee you they didn't.
  It's damn near impossible to automatically check the licensing for all the stuff they got she we know for a fact they got stuff whose licensing does not allow it to be used this way. Microsoft has already been sued for Copilot, and these lawsuits will keep coming. Assuming they somehow managed to only grab legit material and they used excellent legal advisors that assured them out would stand in court, it's definitely impossible to tell what piece of what goes where after it becomes a LLM token, and also impossible to tell what future lawsuits will decide about it.
  Where does that leave OpenAI? With the good ol' "I grabbed something off the internet because I could". Why does that sound familiar? It's something people have been doing since the internet was invented, it's commonly referred to as "piracy". But it's supposed to be wrong and illegal. Well either it's wrong and illegal for everybody or the other way around.
- Yes, notice I said "Scrape" and not "steal" :)

If this lawsuit is ruled in favor of the plaintiff, it might lead to lawsuits against those who have collected and used private data more maliciously, from advertisement-targeting services to ALPR services that reveal to law enforcement your driving habits.

So some of the most profitable corporations in the world? In that case this lawsuit isn't going anywhere.

So we can sue robots but when I ask if we can tax them, and reduce human working hours, I'm the crazy one?

So we can sue robots
... No?
What would you tax exactly? Robots don't earn an income and don't inherently make a profit. You could tax a company or owner who profits off of robots and/or sells their labor.
- It would have to be some sort of moderated labor cost saving tax kind of thing enforced by the government
- I'm not sure how feasible it is but I've seen a sort of "minimum wage" for robots suggested which is paid to the government as tax.
What would be the legal argument for this? I'm not against it but I don't know how it could be argued.
- Legal basis for suing a company that uses another company’s product/creations without approval seems like a fairly pretty straightforward intellectual property issue.
  Legal basis for increased taxes on revenue from AI or automation in general could be created in the same way that any tax is created: through legislation. Income tax didn’t exist before, now it does. Tax breaks for mortgage interest didn’t use it exist, now it does. Levying higher taxes on companies that rely heavily on automated systems and creating a UBI out of the revenue might not exist right now, but it can, if the right people are voted in to pass the right laws.
- I'm no expert on law but maybe something about AI unethically taking our jobs away
- It could be argued that when our tax code, laws, and constitution were created there weren't AIs taking jobs and funneling the economy to only a few people breaking the system and it's time for us to adapt as a society. But I know adapting isn't a strength of our legal system.
  Also, you wouldn't be suing the AI as it's own entity. You would be suing the creator/owner that is allowing it to steal people's content. AI is not to the point it is sentient and responsible for it's own actions.

People talk about OpenAI as if its some utopian saviour that's going to revolutionise society. When in reality its a large corporation flooding the internet with terrible low-quality content using machine learning models that have existed for years. And the fields it is "automating" are creative ones that specifically require a human touch, like art and writing. Language learning models and image generation isn't going to improve anything. They're not "AI" and they never will be. Hopefully when AI does exist and does start automating everything we'll have a better economic system though :D

The thing that amazes me the most about AI Discourse is, we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible. My best guess is that people with a CS degree who believe in AI slept through all their classes.
- The existence of natural intelligence is the proof that artificial intelligence is possible.
- we all learned in Theory of Computation that general AI is impossible.
  I strongly suspect it is you who has misunderstood your CS courses. Can you provide some concrete evidence for why general AI is impossible?
- We can simulate all manner of physics using a computer, but we can't simulate a brain using a computer? I'm having a real hard time believing that. Brains aren't magic.
- It's all buzzword exaggerations. It's marketing.
  Remember when hoverboards were for things that actually hover instead of some motorized bullshit on two wheels? Yeah, same bullshit.

Good. Technology always makes strides before the law can catch up. The issue with this is that multi million dollar companies use these gaps in the law to get away with legally gray and morally black actions all in the name of profits.

Edit: This video is the best way to educate yourself on why ai art and writing is bad when it steals from people like most ai programs currently do. I know it's long, but it's broken up into chapters if you can't watch the whole thing.

Totally agree. I don't care that my data was used for training, but I do care that it's used for profit in a way that only a company with big budget lawyers can manage
- But if we're drawing the line at "did it for profit", how much technological advancement will happen? I suspect most advancement is profit driven. Obviously people should be paid for any work they actually put in, but we're talking about content on the internet that you willingly create for fun and the fact it's used by someone else for profit is a side thing.
  And quite frankly, there's no way to pay you for this. No company is gonna pay you to use your social media comments to train their AI and even if they did, your share would likely be pennies at best. The only people who would get paid would be companies like reddit and Twitter, which would just write into their terms of service that they're allowed to do that (and I mean, they already use your data for targeting ads and it's of course visible to anyone on the internet).
  So it's really a choice between helping train AI (which could be viewed as a net benefit for society, depending on how you view those AIs) vs simply not helping train them.
  Also, if we're requiring payment, only the super big AI companies can afford to frankly pay anything at all. Training an AI is already so expensive that it's hard enough for small players to enter this business without having to pay for training data too (and at insane prices, if Twitter and Reddit are any indication).
I'm honestly at a loss for why people are so up at arms about OAI using this practice and not Google or Facebook or Microsoft, ect. It really seems we're applying a double standard just because people are a bit pissed at OpenAI for a variety of reasons, or maybe just vaguely mad at the monetary scale of "tech giants"
My 2 cents: I don't think content posted on the open internet (especially content produced by users on a free platform being claimed not by those individuals but by the platforms themselves) should be litigated over, when that information isnt even being reproduced but being used on derivative works. I think it's conceptually similar to an individual reading a library of books to become a writer and charge for the content they produce.
I would think a piracy community would be against platforms claiming ownership over user generated content at all.
- https://youtu.be/9xJCzKdPyCo
  This video can answer just about any question you ask. It's long, but it's split up into chapters so you can see what questions he's answering in that chapter. I do recommend you watch the whole thing if you can. There's a lot of information that I found very insightful and thought provoking

It’s wild to see people in the piracy community of all places have an issue with someone benefiting from data they got online for free.

Key difference is that they're making (alot of) money of off the stolen work, and in a way that's only possible for the already filthy rich
Wouldn't mind it personally if it was foss though, like their name suggests
- FWIW even if it was FOSS I'd still care. For me it's more about intent. If your business model/livelihood relies on stealing from people there's a problem. That's as true on a business level as it is an individual one.
  Doesn't mean I have an answer as sometimes it's extremely complex. The easy analogy is how we pirate TV shows and movies. Netflix originally proved this could be mitigated by providing the material cheaply and easily. People don't want to steal (on average).
The difference is that they are profitting from other people's work and properties, I don't profit from watching a movie or playing a game for free, I just save some money.
- You do if you make games or movies and those things give you inspiration.
  This is just how learning is done though, whether it's AI or human.
Many of us are sharing without reward and have strong ethical beliefs regarding for-profit distribution of material versus non-profit sharing.
They're using people's content without authorization, but for a open information ideology or something like that, they are closed source and they are using it to make money. I don't think that should be illegal, but it is certainly a dick move
It really isn't that bonkers. A lot software thought is about licensing. See GPL and Creative Commons and all that stuff thats all about how things can be profited from/responsibilities around it. Benefiting from free data is one thing. Privately profiting at the expense or not sharing the capability/advances that came from it is another. Willing to bet there's GPL violations via the training sets.
Is it even possible to attach licenses to text posts on social media?

Curious to see if this goes anywhere.

inal but i think it's going to come down to the terms of service where the data was scraped from. If the terms say the stuff you post can be shared with third parties then they might not have a leg to stand on. Where it gets sketchy is if someone posted someone else's work, then the original author had no say in it being shared with a third party, BUT, is that the fault of the third party or the service provider that shared it?
Also, if i were exposed to copyright material through some unauthorised person distributing it can i not summarize the information? I guess i don't know enough about fair use to answer that.
The wording in the article says they are being sued for stealing their data, this seems like a stretch but i guess i'll wait for more details of the case.
- I agree with the terms of service bit, but the hard part is going through the tos for so many different sites. Sort like how some open source code bases can't re-license a code base because it is impossible to get into contact with all the people who have contributed to the project over the years. Online platforms already have certain protections from their users posting illegal content to their sites. We will have to see if that is extended to these large language models. When it comes to free use, there is no such thing. Free use must be proven in court. Each and every time. There are no guidelines on what is and isn't free use when it comes to word of law, so that can swing either way. Just my two cents on the matter. Also, (inal).
- The thing is that the images are used to train a set of weights and biases; the training data isn't distributed as part of the AI or as part of the software used to generate images.

I don't see how this is any different than humans copying or being inspired by something. While I hate seeing companies profiting off of the commons while giving nothing of value back, how do you prove that an AI model is using your work in any meaningful or substantial way? What would make me really mad is if this dumb shit leads to even harsher copyright laws. We need less copyright not more.

I once looked outside. Could I be sued for observing a public space?

i once looked at a picture of spider man and badman then made a crappy drawing biterman
to jail with me!
- Long live baman and piderman

Piracy isn't stealing and neither is this.

yarrr!
Piracy also isn't copyright infringement but that's what this is. Under the law, which sucks. And if it applies to us it should apply to them.
- Seeders are committing copyright infringement, by definition. Piracy actively encourages that behavior. Whether that is unethical or not can be debated though (FBI, I swear I have nyaa idea how qBT ended up on my machine, must have been a virus from a 4chan hacker).
Piracy is literally theft, what are you talking about?
- It is absolutely not theft. If you’d like a physical crime to compare it to, forgery would be what you are looking for. But piracy is not at all theft.
  That is, unless you are talking about Captain Davy Jones and his pirate ship. That type of piracy is theft.

I can’t speak for others, but I don’t consider posts I made on a website I don’t own to be my property. If anything, it’s amusing to think of my idiotic rants making up a tiny fraction of an AIs “knowledge”.

Hope it goes through and sets a president.

Vote Skynet for 2024 Presidential Election, the efficient choice!
And give up billions in inflated stock valuations? Not a chance!
Ricky?! Is that you?
I think you mean precident
- I think you mean precindent