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The trick here is that OpenAI might win and won’t be liable for plagiarizing the NYT (or my own GitHub repo, as I observed with GPT-3.5). But if YOU ask ChatGPT for something about American politics for your blog, and it gives you a paragraph from the NYT, then YOU are responsible for the copyright infringement. Even though you of course had no clue it was plagiarized.

I do not think this is at all likely to happen with newer LLMs, but when GPT-3.5 spat out hundreds of lines of my own F#, verbatim, it certainly convinced me that this tech is too skeezy and unethical for me to use. I really don’t like the idea of playing Plagiarism Roulette.




> and it gives you a paragraph from the NYT, then YOU are responsible for the copyright infringement. Even though you of course had no clue it was plagiarized.

No. They indemnify you for from copyright lawsuits that arise for your use of ChatGPT output. https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/


I had forgotten that, I think they had changed it a few months after ChatGPT launched in response. But you'll still be the one getting the angry letter. And this is a pretty shady exception IMO:

> This section governs your use of services or features that OpenAI offers on an alpha, preview, early access, or beta basis (“Beta Services”). Beta Services are offered “as-is” to allow testing and evaluation and are excluded from any indemnification obligations OpenAI may have to you.




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