A researcher who used to work at OpenAI is claiming that they broke the law by using copyrighted materials to train their AI models. The whistleblower also says that OpenAI’s whole way of doing business could totally shake up the internet as we know it.
Suchir Balaji,25, worked at OpenAI for four years. But he got so freaked out by what they were doing, he quit!
He is basically saying that now that ChatGPT is making big bucks, they can’t just grab stuff from the internet without permission. It’s not “fair use” anymore, he says.
Of course, OpenAI is fighting back, saying they’re totally in the clear. Things are getting messy because even the New York Times is suing them over this whole copyright thing!”
“If you believe what I believe,” Balaji told the NYT, “You have to just leave the company.”
Balaji’s warnings, which he outlined in a post on his personal website, adds to the ever-growing controversy around the AI industry’s collection and use of copyrighted material to train AI models which was largely conducted without comprehensive government regulation and outside of the public eye.
“Given that AI is evolving so quickly,” intellectual property lawyer Bradley Hulbert told the NYT, “it is time for Congress to step in.”
So, picture this: It’s 2020, and Balaji, fresh out of college maybe, lands this cool job at OpenAI. He’s basically part of this team whose job it is to scour the web and gather all kinds of stuff to feed these AI models. Back then, OpenAI was still playing the whole “we’re just researchers” card, so nobody was really paying attention to where they were getting all this data from. Copyright? Meh, not a big deal… yet!”
“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data,” Balaji told the NYT. “That was the mindset at the time.”
But then, boom! ChatGPT explodes onto the scene in 2022, and everything changes. Suddenly, this thing isn’t just some nerdy research project anymore.
This article was first posted by me on ''medium.com.''
Detailed Article link: https://medium.com/@sadozye86/openai-whistleblower-disgusted-that-his-job-was-to-collect-copyrighted-data-for-training-its-models-b4c706160ef9?sk=v2%2F748cc9e9-d0ca-4f23-bb5b-d54a5a5b2aa9