cross-posted from: https://lemmy.intai.tech/post/43759
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/949452
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sam Altman are in massive trouble. OpenAI is getting sued in the US for illegally using content from the internet to train their LLM or large language models
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.
The difference between piracy and having your content used for training a generative model, is that in the latter case, the content isn’t redistributed. It’s like downloading a movie from netflix (and eventually distributing it for free) vs watching a movie on netflix and using it as inspiration to make your own movie.
The legality of it all is unclear and most of that is because the technology evolved so quickly that the legal framework is just not equipped to deal with it. Despite the obvious moral issues with scraping artist’s content.