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0 pointsunraveller1y ago0 comments

Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it.

Training on X doesn't run afoul of fair-use because it doesn't redistribute nor does using it simply publish a recitation (as Suchir suggested). Summoning an LLM is closer to the act of editing in a text editor than it is to republishing. His hang up was on how often the original works were being substituted for chatGPT, but like AI sports articles, overlap is to be expected for everything now. Even without web scraping in training it would be impossible to block every user intention to remake an article out of the magic "editor" - that's with no-use of the data not even fair-use.

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hnfong1y ago

> Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it.

That's plainly false. Generally, if you redistribute "derivative works" you're also infringing. The question is what counts as derivative works, and I'm pretty sure lawyers and judges are perfectly capable of complicating the picture given the high stakes.

unravellerOP1y ago

Direct derivative works of a single work is easy to prove by model activation but input/output similarity is much easier to get outrage points. True internal function would show that no-use is required to "distribute" derivative seeming content which is rather confusing and is effectively the defense. At these levels a derivative of a derivative is indistinguishable to the human eye anyway.

Soon people will get that you can no longer assume when two pieces of text are similar it is because of direct plagiarism.

hnfong1y ago

No, you don't only look at the end result when determining whether a work is derivative of another. The process with which one produced the work has implications whether it is a derivative or not.

For one, if you can show that you didn't use the original copyrighted work, then your work is not a derivative, no matter how similar the end results are.

And then if the original work was involved, how it was used and what processes were used to are also relevant.

That's why OpenAI employees who did the scraping first-hand are valuable witnesses to those who are suing OpenAI.

Legal processes proceed in a way that is often counter-intuitive to technologists. IMHO you'd gain a better perspective if you actually tried to understand it rather than confidently assume what you already know from tech-land applies to law.

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mattigames1y ago

"Summoning an LLM is closer to the act of editing in a text editor than it is to republishing." This quote puts so succinctly all that is wrong with LLM, it's the most convenient interpretation to an extreme point, like the creators of fair use laws ever expected AI to exist, like the constrains of human abilities were never in the slightest influential to the fabrication of such laws.

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0 pointsunraveller1y ago0 comments

Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it.

0 comments

hnfong1y ago

> Web scraping is legal and benefiting from published works is entirely the point, so long as you don't merely redistribute it.

unravellerOP1y ago

Soon people will get that you can no longer assume when two pieces of text are similar it is because of direct plagiarism.

hnfong1y ago

No, you don't only look at the end result when determining whether a work is derivative of another. The process with which one produced the work has implications whether it is a derivative or not.

For one, if you can show that you didn't use the original copyrighted work, then your work is not a derivative, no matter how similar the end results are.

And then if the original work was involved, how it was used and what processes were used to are also relevant.

That's why OpenAI employees who did the scraping first-hand are valuable witnesses to those who are suing OpenAI.

1 more reply

mattigames1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse