Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law
Suchir Balaji helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot.
Suchir Balaji left OpenAI in August.Credit...Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times
By
Cade Metz
Suchir Balaji spent nearly four years as an artificial intelligence researcher at OpenAI. Among other projects, he helped gather and organize
the enormous amounts of internet data the company used to build its online chatbot, ChatGPT.
At the time, he did not carefully consider whether the company had a legal right to build its products in this way. He assumed the San Francisco start-up was free to use any internet data, whether it was copyrighted or not.
But after the
release of ChatGPT in late 2022, he thought harder about what the company was doing. He came to the conclusion that OpenAI’s use of copyrighted data violated the law and that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet.
In August, he left OpenAI because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” he said during a recent series of interviews with The New York Times.
Mr. Balaji, 25, who has not taken a new job and is working on what he calls “personal projects,” is among the first employees to leave a major A.I. company and speak out publicly against the way these companies have used copyrighted data to create their technologies. A former vice president at the London start-up Stability AI, which specializes in image- and audio-generating technologies, has made
similar arguments.
Over the past two years, a number of individuals and businesses have sued various A.I. companies, including OpenAI, arguing that they illegally used copyrighted material to train their technologies. Those who have filed suits include
computer programmers,
artists,
record labels,
book authors and
news organizations.
In December, The New York Times
sued OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of articles published by The Times to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. Both companies have denied the claims.
Many researchers who have worked inside OpenAI and other tech companies have
cautioned that A.I. technologies could cause serious harm. But most of those warnings have been about future risks, like A.I. systems that could one day help create new bioweapons or
even destroy humanity.
Mr. Balaji believes the threats are more immediate. ChatGPT and other chatbots, he said, are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems.
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told The Times.
OpenAI disagrees with Mr. Balaji, saying in a statement: “We build our A.I. models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”
Image
The OpenAI offices in San Francisco. Many researchers who have worked at the company and other leading tech companies have publicly warned that A.I. technologies could cause serious harm.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times
In 2013, an artificial intelligence start-up in London called DeepMind unveiled A.I. technology that
learned to play classic Atari games on its own, including Space Invaders, Pong and Breakout.
When Mr. Balaji was a teenager growing up in Cupertino, Calif., he stumbled across a news story about the technology. It captured his imagination, as did a
later DeepMind creation that mastered the ancient game of Go.
“I thought that A.I. was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging,” he said. “I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them.”
During a gap year after high school and as a computer science student at the University of California, Berkeley, Mr. Balaji began exploring the key idea behind DeepMind’s technologies:
a mathematical system called a neural network that could learn skills by analyzing digital data.
In 2020, he joined a stream of Berkeley grads who went to work for OpenAI. In early 2022, Mr. Balaji began gathering digital data for a
new project called GPT-4. This was a neural network that
spent months analyzing practically all the English language text on the internet.
Image
Suchir Balaji began exploring ideas behind neural networks long before he took a job at OpenAI.Credit...Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times
He and his colleagues, Mr. Balaji said, treated it like a research project. Though OpenAI had recently transformed itself into a profit-making company and had started selling access to
similar technology called GPT-3, they did not think of their work as something that would compete with existing internet services. GPT-3 was not a chatbot. It was a technology that allowed businesses and computer coders to build other software apps.
“With a research project, you can, generally speaking, train on any data,” Mr. Balaji said. “That was the mind-set at the time.”
Then OpenAI released ChatGPT. Initially driven by a precursor to GPT-4 and later by GPT-4 itself, the chatbot grabbed the attention of hundreds of millions of people and quickly became a
moneymaker.
OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies have said that using internet data to train their A.I. systems meets the requirements of the “fair use” doctrine. The doctrine has four factors. The companies argue that those factors — including that they substantially transformed the copyrighted works and were not competing in the same market with a direct substitute for those works — play in their favor.
Mr. Balaji does not believe these criteria have been met. When a system like GPT-4 learns from data, he said, it makes a complete copy of that data. From there, a company like OpenAI can then teach the system to generate an exact copy of the data. Or it can teach the system to generate text that is in no way a copy. The reality, he said, is that companies teach the systems to do something in between.
“The outputs aren’t exact copies of the inputs, but they are also not fundamentally novel,” he said. This week, he posted an
essay on his personal website that included what he describes as a mathematical analysis that aims to show that this claim is true.
Mark Lemley, a Stanford University law professor, argued the opposite. Most of what chatbots put out, he said, is sufficiently different from its training data.
“There are occasionally circumstances where an output looks like an input,” he said. “A vast majority of things generated by a ChatGPT or an image generation system do not draw heavily from a particular piece of content.”
Image
ChatGPT-4o on an iPhone.Credit...Arsenii Vaselenko for The New York Times
The technology violates the law, Mr. Balaji argued, because in many cases it directly competes with the copyrighted works it learned from. Generative models are designed to imitate online data, he said, so they can substitute for “basically anything” on the internet, from news stories to online forums.
The larger problem, he said, is that as A.I. technologies replace existing internet services, they are generating false and sometimes completely made-up information — what researchers call “
hallucinations.” The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.
Bradley J. Hulbert, an intellectual property lawyer who specializes in this intellectual property law, said that the intellectual copyright laws now in place were written well before the rise of A.I. and that no court has yet decided whether A.I. technologies like ChatGPT violate the law.
He also argued that Congress should create a new law that addresses this technology. “Given that A.I. is evolving so quickly,” he said, “it is time for Congress to step in.”
Mr. Balaji agreed. “The only way out of all this is regulation,” he said.
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