Technology

59673 readers

3369 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

407

OpenAI claims The New York Times tricked ChatGPT into copying its articles (www.theverge.com)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

137 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Hello_there@kbin.social -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I can take the entirety of Harry Potter, run it thru chat gpt to 'rewrite in the style of Lord of the rings', and rename the characters. Assuming it all works correctly, everything should be reworded. But, I would get deservedly sued into the ground.
News articles might be a different subject matter, but a blatant rewording of each sentence, line by line, still seems like a valid copyright claim.
You have to add context or nuance or use multiple sources. Some kind of original thought. You can't just wholly repackage someone else's work and profit off of that.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

But that's not what LLMs do. They don't just reword stuff like the search and replace feature in word, it's closer to "a sentence with the same meaning".

I'd agree it's a lot more murky when it's the plot that's your IP, and not just the actual written wordsand editorial perspective, like a news article.

I think it's also a question of if it's copyright infringement for the tool to pull in the data and process it, or if it's infringement when you actually use it to make the infringing content.