This is a flagrantly blatant violation of OpenAI's terms of use for businesses [1].
I have two issues with those terms:
1. I think that eventually US courts will determine one of two things: that OpenAI et al are guilty of massive infringement, or that these sorts of restrictive terms aren't enforceable. The need that these companies are trying to treat with terms on output seems unlikely to work out in the end. But we'll see.
2. Even if the terms are enforcable, the human review step in the tweet seems like it's make OpenAI's threading-the-needle position here even more fucking difficult to be taken seriously by any jury or judge.
However, enforcing the terms seems real damn hard in the case of small businesses... as long as you're not stupid enough to admit to violating them in a twitter thread, of course.
I think the author is probably safe from legal action for now because I don't think OpenAI is particularly eager to test the enforcability of their terms. And even if they are, doing so in this case is super high risk and super low reward. Still, I wouldn't test it by openly admitting to ToS violation like this. At the very least seems like a good way to get cut off from OAI APIs.
> 2. Restrictions [...] You will not, and will not permit End Users to: [...] use Output [...] to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services.
Of course, you can simply ignore it, just like OpenAI is happy to ignore the terms of services on scraped websites and pirated ebooks and so on.
What are they going to do - claim your model is a derivative work of the training data?
> (e) use Output (as defined below) to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services. However, you can use Output to (i) develop artificial intelligence models primarily intended to categorize, classify, or organize data (e.g., embeddings or classifiers), as long as such models are not distributed or made commercially available to third parties and (ii) fine tune models provided as part of our Services;
Depending on what kind of model they trained, they might be breaking these terms.
Right but the condition is for "models that compete with our products and service". Can you really argue that this niche app competes with OpenAI's products? Couldn't you make an argument that this only applies to products and services that directly compete with OpenAI, i.e. other LLM API's or a ChatGPT competitor such as a Claude or Bart?
The person who created it is using it as a direct replacement to paying OpenAI. They probably won’t consider pursuing this small individual, but if a big enough company did it, they’d probably have a problem with that.
A direct replacement is still different than a “competing product” which implies is sold to customers. His product (the app) doesn’t compete with OpenAI. I guess a lawyer would need to chime in
I have two issues with those terms:
1. I think that eventually US courts will determine one of two things: that OpenAI et al are guilty of massive infringement, or that these sorts of restrictive terms aren't enforceable. The need that these companies are trying to treat with terms on output seems unlikely to work out in the end. But we'll see.
2. Even if the terms are enforcable, the human review step in the tweet seems like it's make OpenAI's threading-the-needle position here even more fucking difficult to be taken seriously by any jury or judge.
However, enforcing the terms seems real damn hard in the case of small businesses... as long as you're not stupid enough to admit to violating them in a twitter thread, of course.
I think the author is probably safe from legal action for now because I don't think OpenAI is particularly eager to test the enforcability of their terms. And even if they are, doing so in this case is super high risk and super low reward. Still, I wouldn't test it by openly admitting to ToS violation like this. At the very least seems like a good way to get cut off from OAI APIs.
[1] https://openai.com/policies/business-terms