Mailing List Archive

[Wikimedia-l] Re: Bing-ChatGPT
On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 3:49 PM Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 7:05?PM Steven Walling <steven.walling@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > IANAL of course, but to me this implies that responsibility for the
> *egregious* lack
> > of attribution in models that rely substantially on Wikipedia is
> violating the Attribution
> > requirements of CC licenses.
>
> Morally, I agree that companies like OpenAI would do well to recognize
> and nurture the sources they rely upon in training their models.
> Especially as the web becomes polluted with low quality AI-generated
> content, it would seem in everybody's best interest to sustain the
> communities and services that make and keep high quality information
> available. Not just Wikimedia, but also the Internet Archive, open
> access journals and preprint servers, etc.
>
> Legally, it seems a lot murkier. OpenAI in particular does not
> distribute any of its GPT models. You can feed them prompts by various
> means, and get responses back. Do those responses plagiarize
> Wikipedia?
>
> With image-generating models like Stable Diffusion, it's been found
> that the models sometimes generate output nearly indistinguishable
> from source material [1]. I don't know if similar studies have been
> undertaken for text-generating models yet. You can certainly ask GPT-4
> to generate something that looks like a Wikipedia article -- here are
> example results for generating a random Wikipedia article:
>
> Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley_(film)
> GPT-4 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley_(film)GPT-4>
> run 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/1
> (cut off at the ChatGPT generation limit)
> GPT-4 run 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/2
> GPT-4 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/2GPT-4>
> run 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/GPT4_Example/3
>
> It imitates the form of a Wikipedia article & mixes up / makes up
> assertions, but I don't know that any of its generations would meet
> the standard of infringing on the Wikipedia article's copyright. IANAL
> either, and as you say, the legal landscape is evolving rapidly.
>
> Warmly,
> Erik


The whole thing is definitely a hot mess. If the remixing/transformation by
the model is a derivative work, it means OpenAI is potentially violating
the ShareAlike requirement by not distributing the text output as CC. But
on other hand the nature of the model means they’re combining CC and non
free works freely / at random, unless a court would interpret whatever % of
training data comes from us as the direct degree to which the model output
is derived from Wikipedia. Either way it’s going to be up to some legal
representation of copyright holders to test the boundaries here.


> [1]
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/researchers-extract-training-images-from-stable-diffusion-but-its-difficult/
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