We’re truly in a dystopian future when big tech nerds are doing mafia hits. Reminds me of that guy in Better Call Saul that hired Mike as a bodyguard.
Police say it appears to be a suicide. Probably true, honestly, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t driven to it.
What whistle did he blow?
I didn’t even read the article. I just barely skimmed it and guess what I found within 2 seconds.
“Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.”
You don’t even need “Hard” proof. The mere fact that ChatGPT “knows” about certain things indicate that it ingested certain copyrighted works. There are countless examples. Can it quote a book you like? Does it know the plot details? There is no other way for it to get certain information about such things.
Facts aren’t protected by copyright. Regurgitating facts about a thing is in no way illegal, even if done by ai and done by ingested copyrighted material. I can legally make a website dedicated to stating only facts about Disney products (all other things the same) when prompted by questions of my users.
I think you’re missing the point. We are talking about whether it is fair use under the law for an AI model to even ingest copyrighted works and for those works to be used as a basis to generate the model’s output without the permission of the copyright holder of those works. This is an unsettled legal question that is being litigated right now.
Also, in some cases, the models do produce verbatim quotes of original works. So, it’s not even like we’re just arguing about whether the AI model stated some “facts.” We are also saying, hey can an AI model verbatim reproduce an actual copyrighted work? It’s settled law that humans cannot do that except in limited circumstances.
His AI GF must’ve convinced him to shoot himself in the back of the head with a shotgun twice.
RIP. Hope that his whistleblowing doesn’t end up falling on deaf ears
