Fans of Studio Ghibli, the famed Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and other beloved movies, were delighted this week when a new version of ChatGPT let them transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct style of Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki.
Lol did you even read the article you linked? OpenAI isn’t disputing the fact that their LLM spit out near-verbatim NY Times articles/passages. They’re only taking issue with how many times the LLM had to be prompted to get it to divulge that copyrighted material and whether there were any TOS violations in the process.
They’re saying that the NYT basically forced ChatGPT to spit out the “infringing” text. Like manually typing it into Microsoft Word and then going “gasp! Microsoft Word has violated our copyright!”
The key point here is that you can’t simply take the statements of one side in a lawsuit as being “the truth.” Obviously the laywers for each side are going to claim that their side is right and the other side are a bunch of awful jerks. That’s their jobs, that’s how the American legal system works. You don’t get an actual usable result until the judge makes his ruling and the appeals are exhausted.
If a fact isn’t disputed by either side in a case as contentious as this one, it’s much more likely to be true than not. You can certainly wait for the gears of “justice” to turn if you like, but I think it’s pretty clear to everyone else that LLMs are plagiarism engines.