Suchir Balaji: “When does generative AI qualify for fair use?”

Fair use is defined in Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which I’ll quote verbatim below:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Fair use is a balancing test which requires weighing all four factors. In practice, factors (4) and (1) tend to be the most important, so I’ll discuss those first. Factor (2) tends to be the least important, and I’ll briefly discuss it afterwards. Factor (3) is somewhat technical to answer in full generality, so I’ll discuss it last.

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None of the four factors seem to weigh in favor of ChatGPT being a fair use of its training data. That being said, none of the arguments here are fundamentally specific to ChatGPT either, and similar arguments could be made for many generative AI products in a wide variety of domains.

Suchir Balaji

Interesting analysis by a former OpenAI researcher who left the company and publicly spoke against their business practices, going as far as an interview with The New York Times – a publication which last year sued OpenAI (and Microsoft) for copyright infringement, so naturally they would want to distribute Balaji’s views. Moreover, in November he became a potential witness in this trial after the Times’ attorneys named him in court filings as having material helpful to their case, along with at least twelve people, including past or present OpenAI employees.

Wired: “Perplexity is a Bullshit Machine”

On June 6, Forbes published an investigative report about how former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s new venture is recruiting heavily and testing AI-powered drones with potential military applications. (Forbes reported that Schmidt declined to comment.) The next day, John Paczkowski, an editor for Forbes, posted on X to note that Perplexity had essentially republished the sum and substance of the scoop. (It rips off most of our reporting, he wrote. It cites us, and a few that reblogged us, as sources in the most easily ignored way possible.)

That day, Srinivas thanked Paczkowski, noting that the specific product feature that had reproduced Forbes’ exclusive reporting had rough edges and agreeing that sources should be cited more prominently. Three days later, Srinivas boasted—inaccurately, it turned out—that Perplexity was Forbes’ second-biggest source of referral traffic. (WIRED’s own records show that Perplexity sent 1,265 referrals to WIRED.com in May, an insignificant amount in the context of the site’s overall traffic. The article to which the most traffic was referred got 17 views.) We have been working on new publisher engagement products and ways to align long-term incentives with media companies that will be announced soon, he wrote. Stay tuned!

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In theory, Perplexity’s chatbot shouldn’t be able to summarize WIRED articles, because our engineers have blocked its crawler via our robots.txt file since earlier this year. This file instructs web crawlers on which parts of the site to avoid, and Perplexity claims to respect the robots.txt standard. WIRED’s analysis found that in practice, though, prompting the chatbot with the headline of a WIRED article or a question based on one will usually produce a summary appearing to recapitulate the article in detail.

Dhruv Mehrotra & Tim Marchman

Another looming issue over the blooming LLM industry: plagiarism and copyright violations. In their hunger for information to train models, AI companies have repeatedly made dubious decisions that have resulted in a number of damning situations. The most prominent was probably OpenAI releasing a synthetic voice which sounded very similar to Scarlett Johansson; Wired reporters were able to download paywalled articles from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic through Quora’s Assistant bot; and the practice is not limited to startups either, as another investigation found that Apple, Nvidia, and Salesforce used thousands of YouTube videos to train AI.

On my Om: “Taboola + Apple News? No thanks”

For over a decade, I have been critical of Taboola (and its one time rival, Outbrain), equating them to the internet’s venereal disease that never goes away. In 2017, when the two companies merged, it became clear that what was the herpes of the internet was mutating into a super bug. I said as much on Twitter. Well, that day has come, and even Apple is now infected.

No way I want to pay to let Taboola and its terrible advertising re-enter my information streams. Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy. As it chases more and more revenue to appease Wall Street, it’s clear Apple will become one of those companies that prioritize shareholders over paying customers and their experience.

Om Malik

It never ceases to amaze me how Apple fans maintain such skewed perception of their revered corporation. Apple hasn’t been “committed to good customer experience” at least since they removed the headphone jack from iPhones; they have been caught artificially limiting battery capacity to incentivize people to replace their iPhones; more recently they were dragged kicking and screaming into upgrading to USB-C and RCS by new EU regulations. Their whole App Tracking Transparency initiative was a poorly feigned move to grab advertising revenue from Facebook, while Apple was cashing in billions of dollars from a deal with Google that clearly wasn’t designed for the benefits of consumer privacy. It’s blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of objectivity that Apple would do just about anything to increase revenues and please stockholders.

Ars Technica: “Users shocked to find Instagram limits political content by default”

Instagram quietly introducing a ‘political’ content preference and turning on ‘limit’ by default is insane? wrote another X user named Matt in a post with nearly 40,000 views.

Instagram apparently did not notify users directly on the platform when this change happened.

Instead, Instagram rolled out the change in February, announcing in a blog that the platform doesn’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow. That post confirmed that Meta won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads, so that those platforms can remain a great experience for everyone.

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For general Instagram and Threads users, this change primarily limits what content posted can be recommended, but for influencers using professional accounts, the stakes can be higher. The Washington Post reported that news creators were angered by the update, insisting that Meta’s update diminished the value of the platform for reaching users not actively seeking political content.

Ashley Belanger

I don’t see this particular setting in my Instagram account – I’m on Android and in the EU, both circumstances that may delay the rollout – but adding a very consequential switch and selecting a default without informing users feels very disingenuous. It’s fairly obvious why Meta is doing this, to eschew scrutiny over their moderation choices for political posts and hide behind flimsy justifications that its users don’t want to see political stuff, but their vague definitions of ‘political’ and these underhand tactics may draw more attention to Meta’s practices. It may also be a negotiating tactic against news organizations, to further reduce their reach and traffic, and then claim that people don’t want news on Meta’s platform.

Artifact News: “Shutting down Artifact”

We’ve made the decision to wind down operations of the Artifact app. We launched a year ago and since then we’ve been working tirelessly to build a great product. We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way. It’s easy for startups to ignore this reality, but often making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved. The biggest opportunity cost is time working on newer, bigger and better things that have the ability to reach many millions of people. I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be. We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.

Kevin Systrom

I could have told you that a year ago, Kevin… Most of what I wrote back then as the app was gearing up for launch has been confirmed after I started using it.

Platformer: “Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback”

Artifact — the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence — is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

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TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.

Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing, but for text.

I saw that shift and I was like, oh, that’s the future of social, Systrom said. These unconnected graphs; these graphs that are learned rather than explicitly created. And what was funny to me is as I looked around, I was like, man, why isn’t this happening everywhere in social? Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook?

Casey Newton

Interesting concept; it seems Twitter’s turbulent present and uncertain future are opening up niches for competitors. I would certainly love a valid alternative to Twitter for news discovery, as Mastodon doesn’t seem that appealing to me – or fit for this purpose.

Erik Torenberg: “The Hypocrisy of Elites”

We recently discussed Rob Henderson’s Luxury Beliefs, the idea being that if people buy expensive luxury goods to showcase how well-off they are, people also hold “expensive” beliefs for the same reason.

This idea is not new: Jared Diamond has suggested one reason people engage in displays such as drinking, smoking, drug use, and other costly behaviors is because they serve as fitness indicators. The message is: I’m so healthy I can afford to poison my body and continue to function.

Saying, I’m willing to redistribute my money and status is a costly but effective way of signaling, I’m so secure in my status and money that I can afford giving it away, seeing as I have a surplus of both.

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This is what being an elite is about, after all. It’s not about money, although money plays a crucial role. It’s not even about education, though education plays a large role as well. It’s more about the set of behaviors and dispositions that indicate a person to be a member of the elite — which center around wanting to change the world. Recall we discussed the leveling and importance game: Wanting to change the world hits the sweet spot because it shows how important one is (you can afford worrying about the planet and not your rent), while also highlighting one’s empathy (wanting to take care of the less fortunate).

Which is the whole point of being an elite. It’s what separates a person from simply being a bourgeois. Aristocrats want to *matter*. Bourgeoisie just want comfort and safety. Meanwhile proletariats just want to put food on the table.

Erik Torenberg

Interesting perspective about the motivations of elites (although I feel the author is purposely conflating ‘elites’ with the ultrarich – you can have elites in particular fields like medicine or physics without the economic means to ‘change the world’). These are plenty of examples of billionaires spending on immensely expensive goods, from private islands to luxury yachts. I think the recent trend of influential people buying social media channels (Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, Trump launching Truth Social, Kanye West attempting to buy Parler, although this last one didn’t go through) can be ascribed to the same inclination of would-be aristocrats to shape the wider world by reinforcing their message.