9 ms·

At this point, is there a way to protect your content from being thrown in the blender other than to not make it available publicly?

by tpxl 3y ago

TheChaplain 3y ago
Perhaps something like AGPL but for text/documents?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Licenses alongside public content won't work because the reason people feel free to train is a legal theory that it does not require permission.
- palata 3y ago
  Do you really think that they don't train on AGPL code?
dragonwriter 3y ago
1. Win a lawsuit establishing that training AI is not fair use, or 2. Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to use it to train AI. 3. For images, using on of the AI-poisoning techniques and publicizing that fact may encourage people to exclude your content from training sets; OTOH, it may backfire, especially against people looking specifically to defeat the AI poisoning technique in use. Otherwise, those operating under the theory that training AI is Fair Use will have no reason not you use the content for training AI.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to use it to train AI. Such a thing is only as good as your ability to enforce it, though. Are you in a financial situation that allows you to afford to sue Google? I'm not.
  - landemva 3y ago
    Set a price list for this type of usage, then pick a jurisdiction friendly to your cause of action.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Your ability to pick and choose jurisdictions is pretty limited (at least in the US). But ignoring that... Having a price list doesn't change the fact that if someone ignores your demands, your only recourse is to sue them. If they have a bigger warchest than you, and are sufficiently motivated, they can drag the whole thing out until you run out of money and can't pursue the lawsuit anymore. This is why such an approach is of limited value in terms of protecting yourself against companies that are sitting on a ton of money. In memory of Don Lancaster, he made a point about this sort of thing: many companies would rather spend $100,000 on legal fees than stoop to paying you a $10,000 fee or royalty.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - landemva 3y ago
        A small jurisdiction with dislike of USA hegemony may be a start, like .ch or .se. Somewhere with a Google presence and where you host your website.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    I was rather explicit that the list was designed for dealing with “those operating under the theory that training AI is Fair Use”. If your threat model is “those only concerned with what they can be forcibly compelled not to do, after evaluating the capacities of each content supplier to resist”, things are different. Which category Google falls into on this is a debate I’m not interested in engaging in.
- dllthomas 3y ago
  A variation on 1 is to get laws passed clarifying when it isn't fair use (in a way that allows you to exclude your work).
JohnFen 3y ago
I've been looking into this pretty closely, and I've yet to find a good solution. The best approach I can find is to set up webserver rules to block connections coming from specific ip addresses, but that's just a whack-a-mole game I can't win. So, for now, all of my public websites are no longer publicly available until/unless I can find a solution.
- palata 3y ago
  That's exactly the risk: if you don't want AIs to steal your work, don't make it public anymore.
theonlybutlet 3y ago
To be honest if it's publicly available, I'm sure the odds that a human looking at your content and copying it vastly exceeds the odds of an AI utilizing it in its entirety. These are billion parameter models.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Depends on how niche what you do is relative to the quantity of information available on it.
  - theonlybutlet 3y ago
    If the person is accessing public information, they can plagiarize your content directly any way if that's the case. They could even think it up themselves, it happens all the time. Ultimately the decision to check they're not utilizing copyright material rests with the human commercializing it.
- palata 3y ago
  A human copying your copyrighted material breaks the law. Doesn't mean they can't do it, but at least it's illegal.
  - theonlybutlet 3y ago
    And that's the crux of the matter. Specific words are input into the algorithm, to conjure your code from a probabilistic model. Use a random sentence generator enough and at some point it'll plagiarise. It's how the human uses it's output is what is important at the end of the day.
    - palata 3y ago
      If you believe that humans have an infinite memory and can optimize to be just on the right side of the plagiarism line, then I suppose it is the same thing. Now my opinion is that humans are not machines, and therefore it makes sense to not apply the same laws. To me, it seems natural to think that a human will never remember every single word of a book they read. Whereas a machine can totally do it. > It's how the human uses it's output is what is important I would take it from the other direction: the AI should be able to prove that it "read" the words like a human (i.e. with a "bad" memory and everything that goes with it).
asdadsdad 3y ago
What's the point of having it public for humans but not for machines?
- redeux 3y ago
  In principal I think it’s less about humans vs machines and more about individuals vs corporations. It’s one thing to want to do contribute to the global knowledge base. It’s another thing entirely to monetize that knowledge wholesale and that’s what AI companies seek.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    > It’s one thing to want to do contribute to the global knowledge base. It’s another thing entirely to monetize that knowledge wholesale You mean like a search engine scraping content and putting ads by results?
    - redeux 3y ago
      Exactly. There are existing mechanisms[1] to tell Google that it’s not allowed to scrape/index your site. 1. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- palata 3y ago
  "Public for humans" is not unconstrained. Permissive open source licences require attribution, copyleft licences have all sorts of requirements. If AI could honor those licences (and all the others), I wouldn't see a problem. But they can't.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I object to the use of my material for helping to train AI. Humans are far less likely to be using it for that purpose, if only because you can't do it at scale with humans.
ozim 3y ago
I think of making something like Wikipedia where I write loads of useful stuff an throw in a handful of dick pics - not mine - but you get the general idea. There are also more sophisticated attacks like even single pixel attacks that one can place in his content. I expect if I put enough counter AI attacks in my websites media/text they will notice that and put me on their exclusion list. Well they are first to pull asshole move so won’t feel guilty.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I rather like how you're thinking here. I think I need to look into how I can throw the biggest monkey wrench possible into the data AI scrapers get from my websites. Make the bastards pay.
jstarfish 3y ago
Make it commercially unpalatable. Nobody will touch 4chan. Have different service levels. Authenticated users get the real thing (rate limited), anyone else gets a dynamic Markov-generated version with subtle errors deliberately introduced.
spaced-out 3y ago
No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available data, even if they're doing so to directly harm the people who posted that data (citation below). Basically, a company called HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn data to sell a service where they would inform companies if their employees were looking for a job on LinkedIn -- because LinkedIn will hide info from your employer for obvious reasons. LinkedIn sent cease-and-desist, then later sued by lost. https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-v-linkedin-and-other-cases-say-about-the-legality-of-data-scraping/ https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
- tpxl 3y ago
  The ruling states you can't use the CFAA to prevent people from scraping. It says nothing of copyright, and indeed you can't just ignore licenses when scraping, otherwise every public repository on GitHub would be a free-for-all.
palata 3y ago
If we don't make this illegal, then I believe copyright is dead. If you don't want your stuff to belong to the AI that wins the race, just don't publish it anymore.

At this point, is there a way to protect your content from being thrown in the blender other than to not make it available publicly?

by tpxl 3y ago

At this point, is there a way to protect your content from being thrown in the blender other than to not make it available publicly?

TheChaplain 3y ago

Perhaps something like AGPL but for text/documents?

dragonwriter 3y ago
Licenses alongside public content won't work because the reason people feel free to train is a legal theory that it does not require permission.
palata 3y ago
Do you really think that they don't train on AGPL code?

dragonwriter 3y ago

1. Win a lawsuit establishing that training AI is not fair use, or 2. Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to use it to train AI. 3. For images, using on of the AI-poisoning techniques and publicizing that fact may encourage people to exclude your content from training sets; OTOH, it may backfire, especially against people looking specifically to defeat the AI poisoning technique in use. Otherwise, those operating under the theory that training AI is Fair Use will have no reason not you use the content for training AI.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to use it to train AI. Such a thing is only as good as your ability to enforce it, though. Are you in a financial situation that allows you to afford to sue Google? I'm not.
- landemva 3y ago
  Set a price list for this type of usage, then pick a jurisdiction friendly to your cause of action.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Your ability to pick and choose jurisdictions is pretty limited (at least in the US). But ignoring that... Having a price list doesn't change the fact that if someone ignores your demands, your only recourse is to sue them. If they have a bigger warchest than you, and are sufficiently motivated, they can drag the whole thing out until you run out of money and can't pursue the lawsuit anymore. This is why such an approach is of limited value in terms of protecting yourself against companies that are sitting on a ton of money. In memory of Don Lancaster, he made a point about this sort of thing: many companies would rather spend $100,000 on legal fees than stoop to paying you a $10,000 fee or royalty.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - landemva 3y ago
      A small jurisdiction with dislike of USA hegemony may be a start, like .ch or .se. Somewhere with a Google presence and where you host your website.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  I was rather explicit that the list was designed for dealing with “those operating under the theory that training AI is Fair Use”. If your threat model is “those only concerned with what they can be forcibly compelled not to do, after evaluating the capacities of each content supplier to resist”, things are different. Which category Google falls into on this is a debate I’m not interested in engaging in.
dllthomas 3y ago
A variation on 1 is to get laws passed clarifying when it isn't fair use (in a way that allows you to exclude your work).

JohnFen 3y ago

I've been looking into this pretty closely, and I've yet to find a good solution. The best approach I can find is to set up webserver rules to block connections coming from specific ip addresses, but that's just a whack-a-mole game I can't win. So, for now, all of my public websites are no longer publicly available until/unless I can find a solution.

palata 3y ago
That's exactly the risk: if you don't want AIs to steal your work, don't make it public anymore.

theonlybutlet 3y ago

To be honest if it's publicly available, I'm sure the odds that a human looking at your content and copying it vastly exceeds the odds of an AI utilizing it in its entirety. These are billion parameter models.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Depends on how niche what you do is relative to the quantity of information available on it.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  If the person is accessing public information, they can plagiarize your content directly any way if that's the case. They could even think it up themselves, it happens all the time. Ultimately the decision to check they're not utilizing copyright material rests with the human commercializing it.
palata 3y ago
A human copying your copyrighted material breaks the law. Doesn't mean they can't do it, but at least it's illegal.
- theonlybutlet 3y ago
  And that's the crux of the matter. Specific words are input into the algorithm, to conjure your code from a probabilistic model. Use a random sentence generator enough and at some point it'll plagiarise. It's how the human uses it's output is what is important at the end of the day.
  - palata 3y ago
    If you believe that humans have an infinite memory and can optimize to be just on the right side of the plagiarism line, then I suppose it is the same thing. Now my opinion is that humans are not machines, and therefore it makes sense to not apply the same laws. To me, it seems natural to think that a human will never remember every single word of a book they read. Whereas a machine can totally do it. > It's how the human uses it's output is what is important I would take it from the other direction: the AI should be able to prove that it "read" the words like a human (i.e. with a "bad" memory and everything that goes with it).

asdadsdad 3y ago

What's the point of having it public for humans but not for machines?

redeux 3y ago
In principal I think it’s less about humans vs machines and more about individuals vs corporations. It’s one thing to want to do contribute to the global knowledge base. It’s another thing entirely to monetize that knowledge wholesale and that’s what AI companies seek.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  > It’s one thing to want to do contribute to the global knowledge base. It’s another thing entirely to monetize that knowledge wholesale You mean like a search engine scraping content and putting ads by results?
  - redeux 3y ago
    Exactly. There are existing mechanisms[1] to tell Google that it’s not allowed to scrape/index your site. 1. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
palata 3y ago
"Public for humans" is not unconstrained. Permissive open source licences require attribution, copyleft licences have all sorts of requirements. If AI could honor those licences (and all the others), I wouldn't see a problem. But they can't.
JohnFen 3y ago
I object to the use of my material for helping to train AI. Humans are far less likely to be using it for that purpose, if only because you can't do it at scale with humans.

ozim 3y ago

I think of making something like Wikipedia where I write loads of useful stuff an throw in a handful of dick pics - not mine - but you get the general idea. There are also more sophisticated attacks like even single pixel attacks that one can place in his content. I expect if I put enough counter AI attacks in my websites media/text they will notice that and put me on their exclusion list. Well they are first to pull asshole move so won’t feel guilty.

JohnFen 3y ago
I rather like how you're thinking here. I think I need to look into how I can throw the biggest monkey wrench possible into the data AI scrapers get from my websites. Make the bastards pay.

jstarfish 3y ago

Make it commercially unpalatable. Nobody will touch 4chan. Have different service levels. Authenticated users get the real thing (rate limited), anyone else gets a dynamic Markov-generated version with subtle errors deliberately introduced.

spaced-out 3y ago

No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available data, even if they're doing so to directly harm the people who posted that data (citation below). Basically, a company called HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn data to sell a service where they would inform companies if their employees were looking for a job on LinkedIn -- because LinkedIn will hide info from your employer for obvious reasons. LinkedIn sent cease-and-desist, then later sued by lost. https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-v-linkedin-and-other-cases-say-about-the-legality-of-data-scraping/ https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...

tpxl 3y ago
The ruling states you can't use the CFAA to prevent people from scraping. It says nothing of copyright, and indeed you can't just ignore licenses when scraping, otherwise every public repository on GitHub would be a free-for-all.

palata 3y ago

If we don't make this illegal, then I believe copyright is dead. If you don't want your stuff to belong to the AI that wins the race, just don't publish it anymore.