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That's entirely unreasonable. Allegations of malfeasance always need to be backed up by evidence.
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But there is evidence, the blog post says: "While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models ."

In other words, yes, they had been using ChatGPT, and yes, ChatGPT could very well have trained on their data. Now that there is evidence, we need an investigation: yes or no, was it the case?

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That is not an admission of malfeasance though? As I read it they don't know if anyone fed relevant private documents into the model under an account configured to permit training on user data.

If there's more to the story I'd be interested to hear it.

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Of malfeasance no, but they could have easily plagiarized unintentionally. If you commit mansalughter, you still need to explain yourself, even if it was a complete unlucky accident.
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So you're saying that they could have committed manslaughter, but acknowledge that we have no evidence that they did. So why should they need to explain themselves? Isn't is on the aggrieved party to bring evidence?
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But the evidence is in the hand of the potential culprit. That's why allegations can be enough to force confiscation and intrusion to get evidence in safe hands before it is destroyed by the accused party.
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Only in the event that there is some reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. Which would generally require evidence.

You don't just get to subpoena your neighbor's bank account because "I know he's stealing from me" you need to first present credible evidence that you were stolen from and that he is among the most likely culprits.

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But I can subpoena my neighbours bank account when I see him driving a brand new 500'000$ car and I have a 490'000$ hole in my bank account and he works in the bank where my money is. And when questioned he evades some questions and threatens to destroy my career.

Any other argument, fc417fc802?

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You're making a classic a burden-of-proof fallacy. The burden of proof lies on the person making the claim, not the person questioning it.

See Russell's teapot for an explanation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

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> You're making a classic a burden-of-proof fallacy

This is incorrect, and you invoke Russell's teapot incorrectly too.

It would only apply if the accusation rested solely on the fact that neither of us have evidence against the accusation.

But that's not the case. First, we know that there could be proof, it's just apparently burdensome and expensive to produce. At that point you're not in fallacy land anymore, you just need a way to balance the cost required of someone to prove the accusations against them false.

Second, we have an arguably plausible mechanism of action that OpenAI does not dispute is possible.

This isn't a legal dispute, so no one is going to force OpenAI to do anything here, but it's not unreasonable (and certainly not fallacious) to suggest that Buckmaster's suggestions are plausible enough it's up to OpenAI to stand behind their denial.

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No, it’s genuinely impossible to know how much of Buckmaster’s Codex data is in OpenAI’s training set.

First, the conversations are anonymized, so there's no simple way to inspect the training dataset and identify which specific conversations belong to Buckmaster.

Second, OpenAI uses these anonymized chats to generate synthetic training data, i.e. they fabricate new conversations based on specific conversation patterns where the model performs poorly, and uses these synthetic conversations as training data for future models. The synthetic data could potentially contain some of selections of Buckmaster's original chats, but it is unknowable how his specific writing could have influenced these synthetic data sets or what portion belongs to him. This information is untraceable and effectively double anonymized.

Third, OpenAI explicitly uses user feedback (the thumbs up or thumbs down ratings), as RLHF to train models. However, this feedback is anonymized and stripped of user identifiers. It's not possible to trace a specific feedback to Buckmaster, nor do we know if Buckmaster ever used this feature. I doubt Buckmaster recalls or can provide a list of every time he used this feature over the past year. OpenAI doesn't have one.

Note that the first and second only happen if Buckmaster "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled, which I find unlikely. But that doesn't exclude option three from this list.

You seem to think that it is some "gotcha" that OpenAI refuses to make a blanket denial, but they cannot do so in good faith, because they have a genuine understanding of their own system. They don't know where the data they have came from.

This situation meets the requirement of Russell's teapot, since neither party has enough evidence to prove nor disprove what information is actually in OpenAI's training set.

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The accused party fails to answer half the questions and makes direct threats. I would say the accuser has already collected enough proof to trigger an investigation.
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That is backwards. It is the responsibility of a researcher to do a thorough literature review and conscientiously avoid plagiarism or claiming false novelty.
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Nobody except OpenAI knows whether or not OpenAI trained on their data. So the burden remains on OpenAI here.
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Incorrect, Buckmaster and Alpöge can comment if they had the ChatGPT "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled or disabled.

If it was enabled, then their work was included in the training dataset.

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As I understand it, that setting does not prevent them training on user data, just which derivatives are used (i.e. just PII scrubbed vs certain types of synthetic summarization)
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In order for this to be the strong evidence everyone also has to believe that the setting is absolutely true. That some logging from some piece of the system could not also leak the prompt information in such a way that it could have been included as training data. Perhaps the design of how data is collected for the training dataset is so rigorous as to make this a practical impossibility. But, it's asking a lot without sufficient detail to completely exclude from possibility that one setting is all that could possibly have been absolutely load bearing in deciding if the other researcher's active efforts meaningfully contaminated the internal model.

At least, as an ignorant outsider, that's how it seems to me.

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That is an absurd and entirely untenable position that breaks with approximately all western conventions.

Only the CIA knows whether or not they're actively covering up reptilian space aliens exerting control over the US government. Therefore the burden of proof remains on the CIA to prove that they are not actively participating in such a scheme.

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I don't understand, OpenAI can just say: "yes/no we did/did not train on your data". It's not a hard question to answer, and it is a question that OpenAI should be able to answer for all data we feed into ChatGPT.
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> It's not a hard question to answer

I didn't realize you had insider knowledge about their systems. Do please explain for the class.

As I understand it they will only have trained on his data if he consented to it. Do you have evidence that they do otherwise?

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This whole discussion is about evidence. That's not proof and it is not certain, but it is evidence pointing into the direction that OpenAI might be doing something that they're strongly incentivized to do. What kind of "evidence" do you see as necessary?
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When someone authors a paper, is it on others to proove the author did not use their work as inspiration? No, it is on the author to give credit where it is due. You guys are acting as if it its legal issue, when it is not.
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You can never prove the negative.
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> OpenAI needs to definitively prove that their agents did not look at the existing work that was about to be published.

I don’t think they’re too concerned about appeasing you, enraged_camel.

For most reasonable people, achievement in solving the other Millenium Prize problems at an unprecedented rate will be enough. At some point people will see models are capable of solving hard issues without whatever 0.00001% of the training data coming from irate individuals who believe their sample was the key component of the solution.

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