The New York Times vs OpenAI: Whoever wins, we lose
Jan 9, 2024
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The podcast discusses the recent lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI over copyright infringement. It explores the impact of AI on the future of content and journalism, comparing how AI and humans consume information. OpenAI's response and collaboration with news organizations is also discussed, along with the financial implications of hiring lawyers. The concept of AI gatekeepers and its disruption in the news industry is explored, highlighting the parallel between Google and OpenAI.
Open AI argues that restricting smaller models to training only on freely available content would limit their capabilities and hinder their value.
The New York Times' lawsuit against Open AI raises concerns about the unfair use of copyrighted material, highlighting the challenges news organizations face in the era of AI and disruptive technologies.
OpenAI emphasizes the value of ChatGPT as a tool for journalists, offering potential partnerships and envisioning a future where it delivers trusted news with proper attribution.
Deep dives
Open AI's Collaboration with News Organizations
Open AI collaborates with news organizations and creates smaller models with impressive performance that may surpass previous models like GPT-3.5. They argue that if smaller models are restricted to training only on freely available content, it would limit their capabilities and hinder their value.
The Concerns of New York Times and Other News Organizations
The New York Times' lawsuit against Open AI raises concerns about the unfair use of copyrighted material. They argue that Open AI's large language models like GPT-4 use their content without permission or compensation, potentially impacting their revenue and subscription base. The lawsuit highlights the challenges news organizations face in the era of AI and disruptive technologies.
The Complex Debate around Fair Use and AI Content Generation
The debate revolves around whether AI-generated content should be treated as summaries or reproductions of copyrighted material. While AI models like GPT-4 draw on a vast corpus of data, they don't directly copy and paste text from specific sources. Open AI's response emphasizes that their models rely on predicting the next word and synthesizing information rather than copying verbatim. However, the New York Times argues for fair compensation, recognizing the value of their original content in training these models.
OpenAI's ChatGPT as a Tool for Journalists
OpenAI emphasizes that ChatGPT is a valuable tool for journalists. It assists in tasks such as analyzing public records, translating stories, and training AI models on historical content. OpenAI acknowledges a past issue where ChatGPT regurgitated copyrighted information from Bing search results, but they have since rectified it. They argue that training models on content is fair use and offer an opt-out for websites that do not want their material included. OpenAI highlights the potential for partnerships with news organizations like the New York Times to provide real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT.
The New York Times Lawsuit and the Future of News
OpenAI disputes the New York Times' claims and alleges that they prompted ChatGPT to regurgitate copyrighted New York Times articles, a behavior that average users would not encounter. OpenAI suggests that the lawsuit is a disappointment and expresses a desire for fair compensation and partnerships with news organizations. They envision a future where ChatGPT acts as a trusted source of news, delivering current reporting with proper attribution. The summary also touches upon the need to incentivize journalism and reshape the news consumption experience, which is currently broken and chaotic.
Over the Xmas break, the New York Times announced it would be suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that its GPT platform is trained on copyrighted NYT content. This has become a problem, according to the NYT, because OpenAI is now a direct competitor.
We dive into the lawsuit, and chat a bit about the media, AI and what the future of content looks like. If you're holding out for the last episode of The Down Round Experience... fear not, it's coming this week.