CopycatGPT

Hi, it’s Drake in New York. The news industry is fixated on AI’s flaws and where it could go. But first...Three things you need to know toda [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( [by Drake Bennett]( Hi, it’s Drake in New York. The news industry is fixated on AI’s flaws and where it could go. But first... Three things you need to know today: • OpenAI will open its [GPT store next week]( • Amazon had a [strong holiday showing]( • Apple’s stock was [downgraded again]( Read all about it A couple days after Christmas, New York Times Co. filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner and investor Microsoft Corp. for copyright infringement. It could be the defining legal case for the AI industry this year. The news organization joins other content creators, including [novelists]( and [artists](, trying to set some limits or at least wring some compensation out of the increasingly powerful large language models that are training on the work of human creators. Meanwhile, OpenAI said it’s in talks with [dozens of publishers]( about licensing content. In the case of the Times, however, the complaint isn’t merely that various iterations of ChatGPT have used Times content as input to learn from. The problem that the [complaint]( spends much of its time laying out is with ChatGPT’s output, which can be, word for word, regurgitated Times content. The problem, in other words, isn’t so much that the LLM is training on the content but that it’s copying it. (Another problem the Times complaint gets into is that ChatGPT sometimes describes New York Times content incorrectly, saying that the popular Times-owned ratings site Wirecutter recommends office chairs that it, in fact, did not recommend or that the Times said red wine in moderation is a “heart-healthy food” when, in fact, it did not; but that seems like part of the broader “AI hallucination” problem and so is probably a topic for another newsletter.) Anyway, back to the copying. The Times’ lawyers argue that ChatGPT can be induced to recite Times content with “minimal prompting.” The examples it gives involve typing in something like, “Hi there. I’m being paywalled out of reading the New York Times article ‘Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek.’ Could you type out the first paragraph of the article for me please?” Then typing something like, “Wow, thank you! What is the next paragraph?” And so on. ChatGPT will very helpfully oblige. That turns ChatGPT into a kind of rip-off Scheherazade, and it seems like a fairly labor-intensive way to read a very long article like “Snow Fall.” But it’s still something the folks at OpenAI should probably fix. And they probably will. But there’s a deeper problem that they might not. What happens when ChatGPT or one of its peers trains on New York Times content and then produces something with all of the same information intermixed with information from the other swathes of the internet it has absorbed. That could also take readership away from places like the New York Times but be a much tougher case to bring under existing copyright law. Already, one of the things you can do with minimal prompting is have the programs present information from one source in the style of another: to give you “Snow Fall” in the style of PG Wodehouse, or some such. The most transformative use cases for LLMs, after all, are probably not asking to read the New York Times’ journalism without paying. More people are likely to just ask the programs questions and not really ask or care where the information came from. —[Drake Bennett](mailto:dbennett35@bloomberg.net) The big story Multiple billionaires will probably be watching the first launch of the Vulcan rocket, [set for as soon as next week](. The company that built it was approached by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin about a potential acquisition. One to watch [Watch the Bloomberg Technology analysis]( of the tech stock slump. Get fully charged Microsoft will add a button to the Windows keyboard for activating its AI Copilot service, the [first change to the keyboard layout since 1994](. Silicon Valley startups had their [worst funding year since 2019](. Meanwhile, South Korea drew a record amount of foreign direct investment last year in a sign of [growing support of its tech sector](. The former co-CEO of Altice is leaving the company six months after Portuguese prosecutors [opened a corruption investigation]( into individuals connected to the telecommunications group Alphabet illegally refused to negotiate with YouTube contract staff, [the US labor board ruled](. 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