Whistleblower's post on ChatGPT, OpenAI goes viral after his death
Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco on November 26. Authorities have ruled his death as a suicide.
A social media post by deceased OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, in which he detailed why the ChatGPT maker's argument of “fair use” in response to lawsuits by media organisations was “pretty implausible,” has gone viral after the news of his death, ruled by officials as suicide, became public.
Balaji, 26, was found dead at his apartment in San Francisco on November 26. The generative AI startup, also located in the Californian city, is facing lawsuits for allegedly breaking the copyright law.
He wrote in the post, “I recently participated in a NYT story about fair use and generative AI, and why I'm skeptical ”fair use" would be a plausible defense for a lot of generative AI products. I also wrote a blog post about the nitty-gritty details of fair use and why I believe this."
Balaji, who was a researcher at OpenAI and left the company in August, wrote in an X post in October that he was at the Sam Altmen-led startup for around four years, spending his final 18 months there on ChatGPT.
“I initially didn't know much about copyright, fair use, etc. but became curious after seeing all the lawsuits filed against GenAI companies. When I tried to understand the issue better, I eventually came to the conclusion that fair use seems like a pretty implausible defense for a lot of generative AI products, for the basic reason that they can create substitutes that compete with the data they're trained on,” it read.
Further, Balaji emphasised that it was important for even the non-lawyers to understand the law: what it says and why it is there.
However, he clarified this was not a "critique" of ChaGPT or even OpenAI, as “fair use and generative AI is a much broader issue than any one product or a company.”
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