> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The constitution is clear that the purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress. I feel that OpenAI is on the right side of that and this is not IP theft as long as they aren't reproducing others work in a non-transformative way.
Training the AI is clearly transformative (and lossy to boot). Giving the AI the ability to scrape and paraphrase others work is less clear and both sides each have valid arguments. I don't envy the judges that must make that call.
No, its not. See the PDF of the actual case below.
The case is largely about OpenAI training on the NY Times articles without permission. They do allege that it can reproduce their articles verbatim at times, but that's not the central allegation as it's obviously a bug and not an intentional infringement. You have to get way down to item 98 before they even allege it.
"Defendants have refused to recognize this protection. Powered by LLMs containing
copies of Times content, Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content
verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of
examples. See Exhibit J. These tools also wrongly attribute false information to The Times."
Still, that's a bug not a feature. OpenAI will just respond that its already been fixed and pay them damages of $2.50 or something to cover the few times it happened under very specific conditions.
Just to double check that it was fixed, I asked ChatGPT what was on the front page of the New York times today and I get a summary with paraphrased titles. It doesn't reproduce anything exactly (not even the headlines).
Interestingly, the summary is made by taking screenshots of a (probably illegal) PDF it found someplace on the internet. It then cites that sketchy PDF as the source rather than linking back to the original NY Times articles.
If I were the NYT I would still be plenty pissed off.
