The NYT Lawsuit Against OpenAI Would Open Up the Times to All Sorts of Lawsuits

The NYT Lawsuit Against OpenAI Would Open Up the Times to All Sorts of Lawsuits(techdirt.com)

9 points by vishnumenon 2 years ago | 5 comments

> Let me let you in on a little secret: if you think that generative AI can do serious journalism better than a massive organization with a huge number of reporters, then, um, you deserve to go out of business.

Does this also apply to a smaller organization like TechDirt?

3cats-in-a-coat 2 years ago | |

I don’t understand how is copying “doing journalism better”? Is software piracy “writing software better” too? Or music piracy “writing music better”? Someone wasn’t thinking writing that.

DemocracyFTW2 2 years ago |

> As the lawsuit makes clear, this isn’t some high and mighty fight for journalism. It’s a negotiating ploy

This I find disingenuous. If I bake a bread and you take it without asking, it's my turn to state what I want: maybe I don't care, maybe I just want you don't do it again, maybe I want you to give it back, maybe I want you to pay, and maybe I want you to pay for the bread plus an extra for my troubles. In a world where almost everything is arbitrated by money it's not extraordinary to demand a monetary compensation for the efforts that it takes to write a newspaper article, and we're not even talking about the quality or even the veracity of said articles; the New York Times makes it quite clear that they don't put their texts out there for grabs, and some data trawler decided those texts were good enough for their nets.

I'm not even saying that whoever trawled the data must pay dollars; I'm not the judge. I just say that techdirt's author uses are very strange point of view here.

> if you think that generative AI can do serious journalism better than a massive organization with a huge number of reporters, then, um, you deserve to go out of business.

This is so besides the point

> It’s a false belief that reading something (whether by human or machine) somehow implicates copyright. This is false.

Well somewhere between "I accidentally saw your headlines while waiting for the bus" and (probably both of) (1) "I reprinted millions of your articles without asking you" or (2) "I downloaded millions of your articles and processed them in order to further my business" one can guess there will be judges who do draw a line beyond which copyright law does come in.

WarOnPrivacy 2 years ago |

There are five or six whole pages of puffery about how amazing the NY Times thinks the NY Times is, followed by the laughably stupid claim that generative AI "threatens" the kind of journalism the NY Times produces.

Let me let you in on a little secret: if you think that generative AI can do serious journalism better than a massive organization with a huge number of reporters, then, um, you deserve to go out of business.

For all the puffery about the amazing work of the NY Times, this seems to suggest that it can easily be replaced by an auto-complete machine.

I've no disdain for the NYT but they can be absolutely wrongheaded sometimes - particularly when it involves technology. This last bit is certainly not limited to the NYT (and inc much of tech press).

From Section 230 to copyright to surveillance to social media to whatever nonsense is claimed by FBI directors - it seems like the staff's reasoning gets paid time off whenever tech is on the table.

up2isomorphism 2 years ago | |

“ Let me let you in on a little secret: if you think that generative AI can do serious journalism better than a massive organization with a huge number of reporters, then, um, you deserve to go out of business.”

Not when your better journalism can be “transformed” for free and sold as a fractional of the price.

It should be quite simple that if NYT is not that good anyway don’t use it in your training. But if you use it you should pay, isn’t that obvious?