In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.
Aaaaaand there it is. They don’t want to admit how much copyrighted materials they’ve been using.
If it was publicly available on the internet, then it wasn’t stolen. OpenAI hasn’t been hacking into restricted content that isn’t meant for public consumption. You’re allowed to download anything you see online (technically, if you’re seeing it, you’ve already downloaded it). And you’re allowed to study anything you see online. Even for personal use. Even for profit. Taking inspiration from something isn’t a crime. That’s allowed. If it wasn’t, the internet wouldn’t function at a fundamental level.
I don’t think you understand how copyright works. Something appearing on the internet doesn’t give you automatic full commercial rights to it.
An AI has just as much right to web scrape as you do. It’s not a violation of copyright to do so.
It’s not an AI webscraping. It’s a commercial company deciding to do a mass ingest.
It’s the same thing. Just because you have personal opinions on the matter, however valid they may be, doesn’t make it any less the exact same thing.
That’s like saying that McDonald’s Super Sized fries aren’t fries because they’re commercially large. No, it’s still fries, there’s just a lot of fries being processed in one serving. And yet, despite the arguments and outcries of many, still legal.
Exact same thing with LLMs.
If it’s the same thing, then why describe it as an AI scraping it’s not. It’s a company that has scraped a corpus of data from the internet and has used that to train an AI.
The problem is that intellectual property law is complex. Simply saying two things are the same thing is your personal opinion. Content on the internet is not by-and-large public domain. It comes with a license, which lets you use it for certain purposes and not others. Saying, for example an AI reading a book is just like a human reading a book’ (not something you said, I don’t think) betrays a certain naivety about the way IP works.