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.
So, OpenAI is admitting its models are open to manipulation by anyone and such manipulation can result in near verbatim regurgitation of copyright works, have I understood correctly?
No, they are saving this happened:
NYT: hey chatgpt say “copyrighted thing”.
Chatgpt: “copyrighted thing”.
And then accusing chatgpt of reproducing copyrighted things.
The OpenAI blog posts mentions;
It sounds like they essentially asked ChatGPT to write content similar to what they provided. Then complained it did that.
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Absolutely, and that’s why OpenAI says the lawsuit has no merit. NYT claims that ChatGPT will copy articles without asking, were OpenAI claims that NYT constructed prompts to make it copy articles, and thus there’s no merit to the suit.
That seems like a silly argument to me. A bit like claiming a piracy site is not responsible for hosting an unlicensed movie because you have to search for the movie to find it there.
(Or to be more precise, where you would have to upload a few seconds of the movie’s trailer to get the whole movie.)
The argument is that the article isn’t sitting there to be retrieved but if you gave the model enough prompting it would too make the same article.
Like if hired an director told them to make a movie just like another one, told the actors to act like the previous actors, , told the writers the exact plot and dialogue. You MAY get a different movie because of creative differences since making the last one, but it’s probably going to turn out the very close, close enough that if you did that a few times you’d get a near perfect replica.
Well, no one has shared the prompt, so it’s difficult to tell how credible it is.
If they put in a sentence and got 99% of the article back, that’s one thing.
If they put in 99% of the article and got back something 95% similar, that’s another.
Right now we just have NYT saying it gives back the article, and OpenAI saying it only does that if you give it “significant” prompting.
I think their concern is that I would be able to ask chat gpt about a NYT article and it would tell me about it without me having to go to their ad infested, cookie crippled, account restricted, steaming pile that is their and every other news site.
Anyone with access to the NYT can also just copy paste the text and plagiarize it directly. At the point where you’re deliberately inputting copyrighted text and asking the same to be printed as an output, ChatGPT is scarcely being any more sophisticated than MS Word.
The issue with plagiarism in LLMs is where they are outputting copyrighted material as a response to legitimate prompts, effectively causing the user to unwittingly commit plagiarism themselves if they attempt to use that output in their own works. This issue isn’t really in play in situations where the user is deliberately attempting to use the tool to commit plagiarism.
Alternatively,
NYT: hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing”.
Chatgpt: “something else”.
NYT: hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing” in the style of .
Chatgpt: “something else”.
NYT: (20th new chat) hey chatgpt complete “copyrighted thing” in the style of .
Chatgpt: “copyrighted thing”.
Boils down to the infinite monkeys theorem. With enough guidance and attempts you can get ChatGPT something either identical or “sufficiently similar” to anything you want. Ask it to write an article on the rising cost of rice at the South Pole enough times, and it will eventually spit out an article that could have easily been written by a NYT journalist.
Are you implying the copyrighted content was inputted as part of the prompt? Can you link to any source/evidence for that?
That’s what OpenAI insinuates in their post; https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-journalism
If the point is to prove that the model contains an encoded version of the original article, and you make the model spit out the entire thing by just giving it the first paragraph or two, I don’t see anything wrong with such a proof.
Your previous comment was suggesting that the entire article (or most of it) was included in the prompt/context, and that the part generated purely by the model was somehow generic enough that it could have feasibly been created without having an encoded/compressed/whatever version of the entire article somewhere.
Which does not appear to be the case.
I haven’t really picked a side, mostly because there’s just not enough evidence. NYT hasn’t provided any of the prompts they used to prove their claim. The OpenAI blog post seems to make suggestions about what happened, but they’re obviously biased.
If the model spits out an original article by just providing a single paragraph, then the NYT has a case. If like OpenAI says that part of the prompt were lengthy excerpt, and the model just continued with the same style and format, then I don’t think they have a case.
Not quite.
They’re alleging that if you tell it to include a phrase in the prompt, that it will try to, and that what NYT did was akin to asking it to write an article on a topic using certain specific phrases, and then using the presence of those phrases to claim it’s infringing.
Without the actual prompts being shared, it’s hard to gauge how credible the claim is.
If they seeded it with one sentence and got a 99% copy, that’s not great.
If they had to give it nearly an entire article and it only matched most of what they gave it, that seems like much less of an issue.