zlacker

>>ssgodd+(OP)
Solidly rooting for NYT on this - it’s felt like many creative organizations have been asleep at the wheel while their lunch gets eaten for a second time (the first being at the birth of modern search engines.)

I don’t necessarily fault OpenAI’s decision to initially train their models without entering into licensing agreements - they probably wouldn’t exist and the generative AI revolution may never have happened if they put the horse before the cart. I do think they should quickly course correct at this point and accept the fact that they clearly owe something to the creators of content they are consuming. If they don’t, they are setting themselves up for a bigger loss down the road and leaving the door open for a more established competitor (Google) to do it the right way.

>>kbos87+Na
Doesn't this harm open source ML by adding yet another costly barrier to training models?

>>hacker+1k
It doesn't matter what's good for open source ML.

It matters what is legal and what makes sense.

>>onlyre+zl
It matters what ends up being best for humanity, and I think there are cases to be made both ways on this

>>bbkane+ym
People often get buried in the weeds about the purpose of copyright. Let us not forget that the only reason copyright laws exist is

> To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries

If copyright is starting to impede rather than promote progress, then it needs to change to remain constitutional.

>>joquar+8w
Copyright isn't what got in the way here. AI could have negotiated a license agreement with the rights holder. But they chose not to.

>>gosub1+MQ
From their perspective they're training a giant mechanical brain. A human brain doesn't need any special license agreement to read and learn from a publicly available book or web page, why should a silicon one? They probably didn't even consider the possibility that people'd claim that merely having an LLM read copyrighted data was a copyright violation.

>>logicc+dV
I was thinking about this argument too: is it a "license violation" to gift a young adult a NYT subscription to help them learn to read? Or someone learning English as second language? That seems to be a strong argument.

But it falls apart because kids aren't business units trained to maximize shareholder returns (maybe in the farming age they were). OpenAI isn't open, it's making revolutionary tools that are absolutely going to be monetized by the highest bidder. A quick way to test this is NYT offers to drop their case if "open" AI "open"-ly releases all its code and training data, they're just learning right? what's the harm?