I was reading this article about the NYT’s suit against OpenAI. OpenAI argued that NYT couldn’t sue for damages because it had been “too long” since the infringing started, and since NYT “must have known” that OpenAI was doing it, they lost the privilege of collecting damages (IANAL but I think it’s because the Doctrine of Laches). In any event, the judge sensibly threw this argument out, telling OpenAI they hadn’t demonstrated that NYT could have known the size or scale or timing of the any alleged infringement.

This made me think: now that the cat is out of the bag and everyone DOES know that everything on the Internet (and beyond) is being fed into AI factories, do we as creators have an obligation to somehow collectively sue LLM makers so that laches can’t be used as a defense in the future?

  • jecxjo@midwest.social
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    28 days ago

    I feel like they need a test case to figure out how to define derivative work when the creator is not human.

    If i make a painting and you see it and then make one in a similar style it would be considered derivative and not a violation. In your head is a distillation of my image. It doesn’t contain the image and your output would be lossy. Similarly the LLM contains statistics and not verbatim content. So the question is “how is human synthesis different than AI synthesis.”

    Until that is resolved a class action would probably fall apart. Individual damages would need to be determined and even a single example of “you put your stuff out to the public and aren’t going aftet Joe who made derivative work…” would derail the case.