Is this a trick question? OpenAI blatantly used copyrighted works for commercial purposes without paying the IP owners, it would only be fair to have them publish the resulting code/weights/whatever without expecting compensation. (I don't want to publish it myself, of course, just transform it and sell the result as a service!)
I know this won't happen, of course, I am moreso hoping for laws to be updated to avoid similar kerfuffles in the future, as well as massive fines to act as a deterrent, but I don't dare to hope too much.
I was envisioning a future where we've done away with the notion of data ownership. In such a world the idea that we would:
> have all of OpenAI's data for free
Doesn't really fit. Perhaps OpenAI might successfully prevent us from accessing it, but it wouldn't be "theirs" and we couldn't "have" it.
I'm not sure what kind of conversations we will be having instead, but I expect they'll be more productive than worrying about ownership of something you can't touch.
So in that world you envision someone could hack into openai, then publish the weights and code. The hacker could be prosecuted for breaking into their system, but everyone else could now use the weights and code legally.
I think that would depend on whether OpenAI was justified in retaining and restricting access to that data in the first place. If they weren't, then maybe they get fined and the hacker gets a part of that fine (to encourage whistleblowers). I'm not interested in a system where there are no laws about data, I just think that modeling them after property law is a mistake.
I haven't exactly drafted this alternative set of laws, but I expect it would look something like this:
If the data is derived from sources that were made available to the public with the consent of its referents (and subject to whatever other regulation), then walling it off would be illegal. On the other hand, other regulation regarding users' behavior world be illegal to share without the users consent and might even be illegal to retain without their consent.
If you want to profit from something derived from public data while keeping it private, perhaps that's ok but you have to register its existence and pay taxes on it as a data asset, much like we pay taxes on land. That way we can wield the tax code to encourage companies that operate in the clear. This category would probably resemble patent law quite a bit, except ownership doesn't come by default, you have to buy your property rights from the public (since by owning that thing, you're depriving the masses of access to it, and since the notion that it is a peg that fits in a property shaped hole is a fiction that requires some work on our part to maintain).
This is alleged, and it is very likely that claimants like New York Times accidentally prompt injected their own material to show the violation (not understanding how LLMs really work), and clouded in the hope of a big pay day rather than actual justice/fairness etc...
Anyways, the laws are mature enough for everyone to work this out in court. Maybe it comes out that they have a legitimate concern, but the way they presented their evidence so far in public has seriously been lacking.
Prompt injecting their own article would indeed be an incredible show of incompetence by the New York Times. I'm confident that they're not so dumb that they put their article in their prompt and were astonished when the reply could reproduce the prompt.
Rather, the actual culprit is almost certainly overfitting. The articles in question were pasted many times on different websites, showing up in the training data repeatedly. Enough of this leads to memorization.
They hired a third party to make the case, and we know nothing about that party except that they were lawyers. It is entirely possible, since this happened very early in the LLM game, that they didn’t realize how the tech worked, and fed it enough of their own article for the model to piece it back together. OpenAI talks about the challenge of overfitting, and how they work to avoid it.
