Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by OkGoDoIt 1155 days ago
Is it actually clear that license restrictions on the training data really do affect the model itself? I know OpenAI says you’re not supposed to use the output of GPT3/4 to train competing models, but that doesn’t strike me as legally enforceable. Most of the discussions I’ve actually seen where lawyers weigh in seem to argue that training these models is pretty clearly fair use and therefore any copyright restrictions on the training data don’t really affect the output. I suppose we won’t know until a case actually goes to court, but I think it’s kind of silly to preemptively say you can’t use these fine-tuned models commercially because of a probably-not-legally-enforceable restriction on some of the training data.
1 comments
yorwba 1155 days ago
Copyright restrictions are not the only possible restrictions.

If OpenAI says you're allowed to use their service under certain conditions, but you violate the conditions, then what's your legal basis for using the service? Forget about copyright, think about breach of contract or even computer fraud and abuse.

link
OkGoDoIt 1154 days ago
But let’s say you used the OpenAI GPT4 service to generate training data for a new model. You then train your model using that generated training data. In theory OpenAI can ban you from continuing to use their API and maybe even sue you for breach of terms of service, but that doesn’t mean the model you created based on that generated data is somehow now illegal to use or distribute. You can still sell or give away that trained model and there’s nothing OpenAI can do about that.

Let’s take specifically the case of Alpaca, the Stanford team generated a finetuning training set using GPT 3.5. Maybe OpenAI could sue them for doing that. But now that the training set exists and is freely available, I’m not using OpenAI if I finetune a new model with that existing training set. I have no contract with OpenAI, I’m not using their service, and OpenAI does not have any copyright claim on the generated dataset itself. They have no legal claim against me being able to use that dataset to fine tune and release a model.

Or am I completely misunderstanding this?

link