Mira Murati, OpenAI’s longtime chief technology officer, sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern this week to discuss Sora, the company’s forthcoming video-generating AI.
It’s a bad look all around for OpenAI, which has drawn wide controversy — not to mention multiple copyright lawsuits, including one from The New York Times — for its data-scraping practices.
After the interview, Murati reportedly confirmed to the WSJ that Shutterstock videos were indeed included in Sora’s training set.
But when you consider the vastness of video content across the web, any clips available to OpenAI through Shutterstock are likely only a small drop in the Sora training data pond.
Others, meanwhile, jumped to Murati’s defense, arguing that if you’ve ever published anything to the internet, you should be perfectly fine with AI companies gobbling it up.
Whether Murati was keeping things close to the vest to avoid more copyright litigation or simply just didn’t know the answer, people have good reason to wonder where AI data — be it “publicly available and licensed” or not — is coming from.
The original article contains 667 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Funny how we have all this pissing and moaning about stealing, yet nobody ever complains about this bot actually lifting entire articles and spitting them back out without ads or fluff. I guess it’s different when you find it useful, huh?
I like the bot, but I mean y’all wanna talk about copyright violations? The argument against this bot is a hell of a lot more solid than just using data for training.
Is this bot a closed system which is being used for profit? No, you know exactly what its source is (the single article it is condensing) and even has a handy link about how it is open source at the end of every single post.
It copied all of its text from the article, and it allows me to get all the information from it I want without providing that publisher with traffic or ad revenue. That’s not fair use.
I do like the bot, and personally I’d rather it stay, but no matter how you look at it this isn’t “fair use” of the article.
Interesting take. In all of the defences of LLMs using copyrighted material it’s very often highlighted that “fair use” allows exactly such summaries of larger texts.
In reality, “fair use” is ruled on a case by case basis, so it’s impossible to judge whether something is or not without it going to court.
We’re not making legislation here, so we don’t have that level of burden of proof. But either way, when it comes to factors of fair use that every authority on the matter will list, it violates almost all of them.
It’s non-commercial, and it’s using facts rather than using a more creative work, so it’s got that going for it… But it’s
composed of 100% copied material
it’s not transformative
it’s substituting the original work
it uses officially published work
it specifically copies the “heart” of the work
it bypasses all of the ads and impacts their traffic/metrics so it has a financial impact on them.
It’s pretty obvious that there is no argument here. The factors that are violated the hardest and most undisputably are the ones that most authorities on the matter (including the one I linked) agree are the most important.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s longtime chief technology officer, sat down with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern this week to discuss Sora, the company’s forthcoming video-generating AI.
It’s a bad look all around for OpenAI, which has drawn wide controversy — not to mention multiple copyright lawsuits, including one from The New York Times — for its data-scraping practices.
After the interview, Murati reportedly confirmed to the WSJ that Shutterstock videos were indeed included in Sora’s training set.
But when you consider the vastness of video content across the web, any clips available to OpenAI through Shutterstock are likely only a small drop in the Sora training data pond.
Others, meanwhile, jumped to Murati’s defense, arguing that if you’ve ever published anything to the internet, you should be perfectly fine with AI companies gobbling it up.
Whether Murati was keeping things close to the vest to avoid more copyright litigation or simply just didn’t know the answer, people have good reason to wonder where AI data — be it “publicly available and licensed” or not — is coming from.
The original article contains 667 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Funny how we have all this pissing and moaning about stealing, yet nobody ever complains about this bot actually lifting entire articles and spitting them back out without ads or fluff. I guess it’s different when you find it useful, huh?
I like the bot, but I mean y’all wanna talk about copyright violations? The argument against this bot is a hell of a lot more solid than just using data for training.
Is this bot a closed system which is being used for profit? No, you know exactly what its source is (the single article it is condensing) and even has a handy link about how it is open source at the end of every single post.
It copied all of its text from the article, and it allows me to get all the information from it I want without providing that publisher with traffic or ad revenue. That’s not fair use.
I do like the bot, and personally I’d rather it stay, but no matter how you look at it this isn’t “fair use” of the article.
Interesting take. In all of the defences of LLMs using copyrighted material it’s very often highlighted that “fair use” allows exactly such summaries of larger texts.
In reality, “fair use” is ruled on a case by case basis, so it’s impossible to judge whether something is or not without it going to court.
We’re not making legislation here, so we don’t have that level of burden of proof. But either way, when it comes to factors of fair use that every authority on the matter will list, it violates almost all of them.
It’s non-commercial, and it’s using facts rather than using a more creative work, so it’s got that going for it… But it’s
composed of 100% copied material
it’s not transformative
it’s substituting the original work
it uses officially published work
it specifically copies the “heart” of the work
it bypasses all of the ads and impacts their traffic/metrics so it has a financial impact on them.
It’s pretty obvious that there is no argument here. The factors that are violated the hardest and most undisputably are the ones that most authorities on the matter (including the one I linked) agree are the most important.