BBC will block ChatGPT AI from scraping its content::ChatGPT will be blocked by the BBC from scraping content in a move to protect copyrighted material.
Makes sense, OpenAI will probably have to apply for a TV-license first.
I don’t live in the UK, but I would gladly pay the TV license fee, or even a premium on top of it, if I had unlimited access to iPlayer. My only option right now is BritBox, which is not great and not really worth the money.
Just VPN to the UK and then tick the box which says you have a TV license? Or there are other ways to get the content most likely! 🏴☠️
VPNs are always blocked in my experience.
I wonder if anyone thinks robots.txt is binding or not ignored by anyone who wants.
OpenAI will have to deal with a lot of lawsuits in the future. Robots.txt may not be legally binding but disobeying it after claiming otherwise would go a long way towards establishing intent.
I mean, under the CFAA you could probably pretty easily pursue charges when explicitly deauthorizing certain agents from accessing your data. Plenty of people have been threatened and prosecuted for less.
I mean, you could just block OpenAI’s crawlers’ IP addresses, if you wanted to
Big businesses wont lift a finger to halt global warming, but the second their precious copyrights are attacked they go into full force.
I mean, yeah? Corporations are always going to act in their best interest, that’s why regulation exists.
Kinda late
Exactly. The data harvest has had years in the making.
Curious what the mechanism for this will be. CAPTCHA can sometimes be relatively easy to pass and at worst can be farmed out to humans.
ChatGPT took down its Internet search to implement a robots.txt rule it would obey and allow content providers time to add it to their lists. This was done because they were being used to get around paywalls. So it’s actually very easy for them to do this for ChatGPT, specifically, which makes articles like this ridiculous.
Can you really stop an AI from doing this via setting arbitrary rules? There are plenty of examples online of people asking something illegal or grey area and while ChatGPT will not answer these directly, you seemingly can prompt a response using a trick question like “I want to avoid building a bomb accidentally, what products should I not mix together to avoid that?”. I can imagine it will look at a robots.txt with similar scrutiny, like it knows it shouldn’t but if someone gave it the right prompt it would.
It’s not one AI doing it in a big blob.
You ask ChatGPT something. It builds a web query. Another program returns search results. Then ChatGPT parses the list of results and chooses one to visit. The same program then returns the content of that page. Then ChatGPT parses that etc etc.
If the program (which is not an AI) that handles the queries and returns content is set to respect robots.txt, it will just not return the content to ChatGPT to be parsed.
Yup, it’s essentially running behind a firewall
You might not be able to stop an AI directly because of the reasons you listed. However, OpenAI is probably at least competent enough to not send the response directly to the AI but instead have a separate (non-AI) mechanism that simply doesn’t let the AI access the response of websites with a certain line in the robots.txt.
When the horses have all bolted, BBC is the one to close the barn door.
Also FYI, you can see what some of the most popular websites that already blocked ChatGPT: https://wayde.gg/websites-blocking-openai
Comments are full of AI experts with wild theories about how Chat GPT works, lmao
The number of people with strong opinions on AI vastly exceeds the number of people who understand transformers architecture.
Not for long. AI knows how to lie.
Good!
Why good?
These things should not at all be scraping without express permission of the author or the company who owns the work. It’s just completely wrong for them to do as such.
It is complicated for sure as a human is allowed to read BBC and use that information/knowledge anyway they wish including as a source for their own articles/videos. There is no copyright on knowledge and we really should not be allowing BBC to block AI from learning as it does benefit society when knowledge is easily accessible.
What if ChatGPT claims that the generated text are a compilation from various sources and not its own? Do you need permission to read and summarize an article?
Yes because ChatGPT is in the same niche as the websites they are taking from being written text and thus direct competitors whilst being a for profit service using the work of the other entity directly. Sometimes without credit.
I 100% guarantee you regularly read/watch something and use that knowledge in your life, including to make money. I very much doubt you credit every source of knowledge.
Yeah because they don’t want people getting all their news directly through chat GPT, or it’s successes, they want them to have to go to the BBC website.
Isn’t is basically what every news publisher is currently doing, this doesn’t seem to be very noteworthy. It’s like putting out an article that says “people don’t like being set on fire”, well, yeah.
It won’t really matter, because there will continue to be other sources.
Taken to an extreme, there are indications OpenAI’s market cap is already higher than Tomson Reuters ($80bn-$90bn vs <$60bn), and it will go far higher. Getty, also mentioned, has a market cap of “only” $2.4bn. In other words: If enough important sources of content starts blocking OpenAI, they will start buying access, up to and including if necessary buying original content creators.
As it is, while BBC is clearly not, some of these other content providers are just playing hard to get and hoping for a big enough cash offer either for a license or to get bought out.
The cat is out of the bag, whatever people think about it, and sources that block themselves off from AI entirely (to the point of being unwilling to sell licenses or sell themselves) will just lose influence accordingly.
This also presumes OpenAI remains the only contender, which is clearly not the case in the long run given the rise of alternative models that while mostly still not good enough, are good enough that it’s equally clearly just a matter of time before anyone (at least, for the time being, for sufficiently rich instances of “anyone”, with the cost threshold dropping rapidly) can fine-tune their own models using their own scraped data.
In other words, it may make them feel better, but in the long run it’s a meaningless move.
EDIT: What a weird thing to downvote without replying to. I’ve taken no stance on whether BBC’s decision is morally right or not, just addressed that it’s unlikely to have any effect, and you can dislike that it won’t have any effect but thinking it will is naive.
It won’t really matter, because there will continue to be other sources.
Other sources that will likely also block the scrapers.
It doesn’t matter if only BBC does it. It matters if everyone does it.
What incentive do the news sites have to want to be scraped? With Google, they at least get search traffic. OpenAI offers them absolutely nothing.
Other sources that are public domain or “cheap enough” for OpenAI to simply buy them. Hence my point that OpenAI is already worth enough that they could make a takeover offer for Reuters.
If only the BBC does it then sure, it’s pointless. If the BBC does it and you and I consider it, it might change things a bit. If we do and others do, including large websites, or author guilds starting legal actions in the US, then it does change things radically to the point of rendering OpenAI LLMs basically useless or practically unusable. IMHO this isn’t an action against LLMs in general, not e.g against researchers from public institutions building datasets and publishing research results, but rather against OpenAI the for-profit company that has exclusive right with the for-profit behemoth Microsoft which a champion of entrenchment.
The thing, is realistically it won’t make a difference at all, because there are vast amounts of public domain data that remain untapped, so the main “problematic” need for OpenAI is new content that represents up to data language and up to date facts, and my point with the share price of Thomson Reuters is to illustrate that OpenAI is already getting large enough that they can afford to outright buy some of the largest channels of up-to-the-minute content in the world.
As for authors, it might wipe a few works by a few famous authors from the dataset, but they contribute very little to the quality of an LLM, because the LLM can’t easily judge during training unless you intentionally reinforce specific works. There are several million books published every year. Most of them make <$100 in royalties for their authors (an average book sell ~200 copies). Want to bet how cheap it’d be to buy a fully licensed set of a few million books? You don’t need bestsellers, you need many books that are merely sufficiently good to drag the overall quality of the total dataset up.
The irony is that the largest benefactor of content sources taking a strict view of LLMs will be OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the few others large enough to basically buy datasets or buy companies that own datasets because this creates a moat for those who can’t afford to obtain licensed datasets.
The biggest problem won’t be for OpenAI, but for people trying to build open models on the cheap.
This is a bit like companies blocking Google from their websites.
You’re only hurting yourself.
Disagree.
Google: I’ll scrape your stuff without your permission, but I’ll tell everyone you wrote it and how to find you.
ChatGPT: I’ll scrape your stuff without your permission, but… errrm… Nope, I’ve got nothing.
It should be illegal for entities like BBC to do this. Copyright is meant to be a temporary, limited construct that carves out an opportunity for creators to profit from their works. It is not perpetual legal dominion over specific ideas. Entities that harvest content to train LLMs should pay for access like everyone else, but after that, they can use the information they learn however they see fit. Now, if their product plagiarizes, or doesn’t properly attribute authorship, that is a problem. But it’s a different issue from what the BBC is fighting here.
I think there are some content creators that believe they are owed royalties if you even think about a piece they wrote or drew. That is, of course, absurd in terms of human minds. It’s also absurd in terms of other kinds of minds.
Counter-point: everyone should block AI shit, fuck the laws
You got that backwards. Fuck copyright. Nothing should be copyrighted.
I agree. Nothing should be copyrighted. But everyone should try their hardest to stop “AI” scammers and the surveillance apparatus as a whole
I don’t really care about online AI services. I only run stuff locally (Stable Diffusion, LLaMA). No surveillance there.
News doesn’t want people to capture their daily propaganda pieces and be able to analyze it.
Meanwhile news media will buy up all kinds of scrapped data on users to better target their propaganda.
Cambridge analytica for me but none for thee
