A few days back, OpenAI responded to The New York Times lawsuit saying that it holds no ground, and is telling only half truth. This is the first time that OpenAI publicly shared its stance on copyright infringement lawsuits, outside of their legal proceedings, hinting at the importance of publishers and news agencies to develop reliable AI systems. 

OpenAI claimed the news organisation is not ‘telling the full story.’ It also alleged that NYT intentionally manipulated prompts with lengthy excerpts to get their model to regurgitate the original article. “The regurgitations New York Times induced appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites,” read the blog. 

The company also said that this sort of a regurgitation is a rare occurrence and that it is constantly updating its systems to be more resistant to adversarial attacks that regurgitate training data. 

“After reading the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft , I find my sympathies more with OpenAI and Microsoft than with the NYT,” shared Andrew Ng, in a recent post on X. 

He said that the regurgitation was because of the RAG-like mechanism of the AI models where they browse the web to then fish out the specific article and print that out. This questions the originality of the AI models to paraphrase and not copy the original content. 

Failed Partnership 

Previously, the NYT tried to form an agreement with OpenAI, which didn’t lead to a solution. OpenAI has been trying to secure deals with more than a dozen publishers, and have already partnered with Associated Press, Axel Springer, American Journalism Project and NYU. 

Additionally, there have been reports that OpenAI is paying only $1 million to $5 million dollars to news publications to licence their news articles for use in training its large language models.  

Meanwhile, Apple has offered multi-year deals worth at least $50 million to news organisations including NBC News, Condé Nast, which owns The New Yorker, and IAC, parent company of The Daily Beast. However, Apple wants the rights to use the content more widely, for future AI products in any way they see fit. 

Tech companies have been extending their efforts to partner with news organisations for many years now. Google News Initiative (GNI) uses the AI news aggregation and search services to personalise content for users. Launched in 2018, this initiative helps Google indirectly to refine their models from the insights gained from high-quality journalistic content.

All of this works on murky grounds, for which no one seems to have a solution, even from the legal system as Arvind Naryanan pointed out on X. “Gen AI makes an end run around copyright and IMO this can’t be fully resolved by the courts alone,” he said. 

Gary Marcus points out in his recent study that it is impossible to train AI models without access to copyrighted content. OpenAI or other big tech companies don’t deny using content behind copyright laws to train their model but now the question of compensation to the creators lies on murky grounds.  

This problem is not unique to just text, Stability AI and Midjourney have been slapped with copyright lawsuits. The trial between Getty images and Stability is still ongoing. Meanwhile, Getty has cut the middle man and taken the initiative to launch their own generative AI services for extra subscription and safe for commercial use. 

While the US and India are still figuring out, the issues of copyright are waived in countries like Japan, Israel, Middle East and China while it is much stricter in the EU. 

AI companies are now eyeing these countries for uninterrupted progress, and hopefully, train their AI systems in case of any hindrance. Stability AI has an office in Tokyo, followed by OpenAI who announced their intention to set up a base there mid last year. (add middle east) 

Now, let’s say if NYT wins its case, or if the US government implements stringent copyright laws, this could significantly disrupt the progress of AI development for US companies, including the likes of OpenAI and alike, while Chinese companies may continue to make progress unimpeded, potentially even achieving AGI without any setbacks.

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