7 ms·

We probably need a better definition of which data is "public". Simply being accessible doesn't cut it. I can look out my window and straight into my neighbour'

by elric 3y ago

We probably need a better definition of which data is "public". Simply being accessible doesn't cut it. I can look out my window and straight into my neighbour's bathroom. Is that public information? Same goes for information on the internet. Sure, my neighbour could put up curtains (and I really wish he would), much like people could restrict access to web pages, but I don't think a lack of protection should automagically imply public access. Much less public access for the profit of some multi-billion dollar corporation.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
Yep. Most of the books are also public, since anyone can borrow them for free in a library, but they're still protected by copyright. Same for movies and tv shows broadcasted over the air.
- zirgs 3y ago
  They are protected by copyright, but anyone is free to learn from them.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    Even AI? :)
    - zmjjmz 3y ago
      Do believe that a human learning from a book is fundamentally different than training a model off of it, and thus should be regulated differently?
      - staticman2 3y ago
        If corporations are allowed to own AI there's a strong argument that it shouldn't be treated anything like a human. Humans aren't property so of course they should be regulated differently from AI.
      - mjr00 3y ago
        There have always been legal differences between a human doing something and technology doing the "same" thing. It's legal for me to go to a nude beach and stare at a topless woman. It's probably legal for me to draw a picture of that topless woman and distribute it. It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet. It's legal for me to overhear a conversation you and your friend are having on a bus. It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online. In most jurisdictions, it's not legal for me to record that conversation. Ingesting data for use in machine learning models is still too new to have any specific legislation around it. But the argument that the technology is just doing a thing that humans do has zero relevance.
        famouswaffles 3y ago
        >It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet. This is legal. You can take pictures of anyone, nude or not in a public setting and post them anywhere. >It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online. This is murky. It's legal to take notes of what you've heard but that comes with all the pitfalls of hearsay. Legally, it's not treated as the human equivalent of recording because humans have no such equivalent.
        ajsnigrutin 3y ago
        The first one is iffy.... probably depends on a country too. If you take a panoramic shot of the beach, and someone is randomly topless.. sure. If you take a telephoto lens and single them out, it's questionable, and in many countries, illegal. Same as with walking vs following someone, even in public... the intent is different, so is the legality.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        I believe this, yes.
    - Y-bar 3y ago
      Putting aside the fact that what we call AI today is not learning in the same way as humans. They operate on a VASTLY different scale compared to humans. On a good week I can read a book. A single book. A massively parallelised data centre can do that billions or trillions of times faster. Scale of effect (lacking a better phrase) must be considered.
  - elric 3y ago
    Sure, but there have been many copyright cases about plagiarism (in writing and in music). It's rarely cut and dry. There's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, which can only seemingly be settled in court. That approach is not feasible when dealing with the amount of data (and copyright holders) that Google gobbles up.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Using AI is probably the most inefficient way to obtain copyrighted content. It's much faster to simply find the original image or text and copy that instead.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    “Free to learn from them” isn’t specific enough. The question is “in what ways are people free to profit off of them?”
  - madhadron 3y ago
    The fact that we call the curve fitting/optimization/compression that we do to fit machine learning models to input data "learning" is really unfortunate and leads to this kind of conflation. If we trace the path of how we ended up here, it's similar to how people incorrectly refer to loci of DNA as genes. We have behavior analysis where we speak of learning as the conditioning via the antecedant-behavior-consequence loop. There was the Hebbian theory of how the ABC loop manifested physically in neurons. Early neural net papers took inspiration from that that mechanism and called it learning. Meanwhile, actual learning is far, far richer than the Hebbian theory of synaptic strengthening, and has a lot more going on than just operant conditioning. So, please, it's time for everyone to stop pretending that the fact that ML inherited the word "learn" as a term of art for curve fitting has any philosophical weight.
tensor 3y ago
Maybe something like an extension of robots.txt. E.g. if your don't allow crawling then the data is not public. I think that's fair, after all if you want complete strangers to be able to search for it arguably you are asking for it to be public.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The problem with robots.txt is that it depends on the crawler to respect it (and many do not). It's not an adequate protection against crawlers in general and a specific form just for AI wouldn't be adequate either, for the same reason.
0xParlay 3y ago
Seems to be well defined and accepted in regards to Third Party Doctrine. Would be silly if AI were the motivation to reconsider what is "public" as opposed to the blatantly obvious run-around of the American bill of rights currently in use. But hey I'll take it.
detourdog 3y ago
What is so crazy is this seem like a disincentive to publish and share ideas. If anything you say can be used in an AI against you... or the alternatively that is not your idea the AI came up with it... This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the crackpots in charge.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  Unfortunately it's not so easy. If I as a person (which is essentially just a biological neural network) can simply go to websites, read the content and use the information I gathered to create slightly modified new content without repercussions, who's to say that an artificial neural network should not be allowed to do that? Just because I'm not as fast? What if I hire 1000 workers in a low wage country to do it for me? As AI capabilities grow, this separation will grow even narrower in the future. There's no realistic way to differentiate web access for human purposes vs. AI purposes in the long run.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    My issue isn’t the mechanics of what is happening. I believe the AI is being used as a shim to work around otherwise prohibited behavior.
  - salawat 3y ago
    Yes there is. You can spin up more compute with a credit card. You can't make 1000 people in the same manner, nor can you own them. Lets be real here though. The only reason anyone is drooling over AI is because it potentially allows one to elide paying someone else, ehich means more money for them.
    - evandale 3y ago
      You can use your credit card to find and convince 1000 people to do your bidding, why is owning them a requirement? You don't "own" the compute you spin up either, you're temporarily borrowing it.
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
prepend 3y ago
> I can look out my window and straight into my neighbour's bathroom. Is that public information? Yes. And there have been numerous court cases confirming this (why we have paparazzi taking topless photos on people on private beaches from public vantage points). I think this is a feature, not a bug, as without a straightforward rule I don’t know how society solves this without causing more harm. If something is public, it’s public. Restricting you from looking in your neighbors open window isn’t something that can realistically be “fixed.” Other than if I don’t want my neighbor to look in, I draw the blinds. This works for paupers and billionaires. If I don’t want people to see things, I don’t make them public. I can’t set a limit of “only people making less than $20k are allowed to view this.”
- dawnerd 3y ago
  What if someone leaks info is that public now? What if someone shares my private info without permission? Should Google be allowed to train on it? How would their systems know? What about pirated other illegal content? The lines are not quite as clear to computers.
  - prepend 3y ago
    IANAL, but leaking is a crime, accessing once public is not. There was a lot of this back during the height of Wikileaks where there were questions about reading classified material being a crime. It is, but once it’s leaked, it is no longer classified, so public. So the crime would be on the leaker, not on Google for training on it.
    - dawnerd 3y ago
      But the question is should google train against it not if it’s legal. Just because it’s public doesn’t mean you have the right to use it, I think that’s the real question we’ll need to figure out.
    - snerbles 3y ago
      IANAL either, but I have held a security clearance and this is very dangerous advice. Unless explicitly declassified the leaked information remains classified, and those who hold security clearances are legally required to avoid all classified information outside of their need-to-know [0]. Now if you have never held a U.S. security clearance, you're less likely to be prosecuted but the history and precedent is murky [1]. The average Joe Sixpack checking out Wikileaks is probably safe, but if I were a journalist publishing the next round of Pentagon Papers I would much rather have a small army of lawyers and a friend or two in Congress. EDIT - Google has federal contracts, so they are probably bound by similar agreements to at least make an effort to avoid any such leaks in their training data for public-facing models. [0] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to-federal-workers-If-you-read-WikiLeaks-you-re-breaking-the-law https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to... [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/22/521009791/q-could-u-s-prosecute-reporters-for-classified-scoops-a-maybe https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/22/521009791...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DeusExMachina 3y ago
I don't think the definition of public is even enough here. Open-source code is public but covered by specific licenses. That's still legally undefined, but there are already ongoing lawsuits.
tmaly 3y ago
what about Google books? Do they get a pass with this?
- bhickey 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
  - tmaly 3y ago
    But using it to train an LLM and profiting off said LLM is different than providing a public service.
pessimizer 3y ago
> "But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!" 13 years ago, we treated cookssource.com like they were rubes, but they were just too early and too small. "The web is considered 'public domain'" https://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html https://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868736 ----- A Follow-Up to "The Web is Public Domain" https://web.archive.org/web/20101112141752/http://www.cookssource.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101112141752/http://www.cookss... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911977

by elric 3y ago

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

Yep. Most of the books are also public, since anyone can borrow them for free in a library, but they're still protected by copyright. Same for movies and tv shows broadcasted over the air.

zirgs 3y ago
They are protected by copyright, but anyone is free to learn from them.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  Even AI? :)
  - zmjjmz 3y ago
    Do believe that a human learning from a book is fundamentally different than training a model off of it, and thus should be regulated differently?
    - staticman2 3y ago
      If corporations are allowed to own AI there's a strong argument that it shouldn't be treated anything like a human. Humans aren't property so of course they should be regulated differently from AI.
    - mjr00 3y ago
      There have always been legal differences between a human doing something and technology doing the "same" thing. It's legal for me to go to a nude beach and stare at a topless woman. It's probably legal for me to draw a picture of that topless woman and distribute it. It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet. It's legal for me to overhear a conversation you and your friend are having on a bus. It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online. In most jurisdictions, it's not legal for me to record that conversation. Ingesting data for use in machine learning models is still too new to have any specific legislation around it. But the argument that the technology is just doing a thing that humans do has zero relevance.
      - famouswaffles 3y ago
        >It's definitely not legal for me to take pictures of that topless woman with my phone and post them on the internet. This is legal. You can take pictures of anyone, nude or not in a public setting and post them anywhere. >It's legal for me to transcribe what I heard and post it online. This is murky. It's legal to take notes of what you've heard but that comes with all the pitfalls of hearsay. Legally, it's not treated as the human equivalent of recording because humans have no such equivalent.
        ajsnigrutin 3y ago
        The first one is iffy.... probably depends on a country too. If you take a panoramic shot of the beach, and someone is randomly topless.. sure. If you take a telephoto lens and single them out, it's questionable, and in many countries, illegal. Same as with walking vs following someone, even in public... the intent is different, so is the legality.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I believe this, yes.
  - Y-bar 3y ago
    Putting aside the fact that what we call AI today is not learning in the same way as humans. They operate on a VASTLY different scale compared to humans. On a good week I can read a book. A single book. A massively parallelised data centre can do that billions or trillions of times faster. Scale of effect (lacking a better phrase) must be considered.
- elric 3y ago
  Sure, but there have been many copyright cases about plagiarism (in writing and in music). It's rarely cut and dry. There's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism, which can only seemingly be settled in court. That approach is not feasible when dealing with the amount of data (and copyright holders) that Google gobbles up.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    Using AI is probably the most inefficient way to obtain copyrighted content. It's much faster to simply find the original image or text and copy that instead.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  “Free to learn from them” isn’t specific enough. The question is “in what ways are people free to profit off of them?”
- madhadron 3y ago
  The fact that we call the curve fitting/optimization/compression that we do to fit machine learning models to input data "learning" is really unfortunate and leads to this kind of conflation. If we trace the path of how we ended up here, it's similar to how people incorrectly refer to loci of DNA as genes. We have behavior analysis where we speak of learning as the conditioning via the antecedant-behavior-consequence loop. There was the Hebbian theory of how the ABC loop manifested physically in neurons. Early neural net papers took inspiration from that that mechanism and called it learning. Meanwhile, actual learning is far, far richer than the Hebbian theory of synaptic strengthening, and has a lot more going on than just operant conditioning. So, please, it's time for everyone to stop pretending that the fact that ML inherited the word "learn" as a term of art for curve fitting has any philosophical weight.

tensor 3y ago

Maybe something like an extension of robots.txt. E.g. if your don't allow crawling then the data is not public. I think that's fair, after all if you want complete strangers to be able to search for it arguably you are asking for it to be public.

JohnFen 3y ago
The problem with robots.txt is that it depends on the crawler to respect it (and many do not). It's not an adequate protection against crawlers in general and a specific form just for AI wouldn't be adequate either, for the same reason.

0xParlay 3y ago

Seems to be well defined and accepted in regards to Third Party Doctrine. Would be silly if AI were the motivation to reconsider what is "public" as opposed to the blatantly obvious run-around of the American bill of rights currently in use. But hey I'll take it.

detourdog 3y ago

What is so crazy is this seem like a disincentive to publish and share ideas. If anything you say can be used in an AI against you... or the alternatively that is not your idea the AI came up with it... This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the crackpots in charge.

sigmoid10 3y ago
Unfortunately it's not so easy. If I as a person (which is essentially just a biological neural network) can simply go to websites, read the content and use the information I gathered to create slightly modified new content without repercussions, who's to say that an artificial neural network should not be allowed to do that? Just because I'm not as fast? What if I hire 1000 workers in a low wage country to do it for me? As AI capabilities grow, this separation will grow even narrower in the future. There's no realistic way to differentiate web access for human purposes vs. AI purposes in the long run.
- detourdog 3y ago
  My issue isn’t the mechanics of what is happening. I believe the AI is being used as a shim to work around otherwise prohibited behavior.
- salawat 3y ago
  Yes there is. You can spin up more compute with a credit card. You can't make 1000 people in the same manner, nor can you own them. Lets be real here though. The only reason anyone is drooling over AI is because it potentially allows one to elide paying someone else, ehich means more money for them.
  - evandale 3y ago
    You can use your credit card to find and convince 1000 people to do your bidding, why is owning them a requirement? You don't "own" the compute you spin up either, you're temporarily borrowing it.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago

prepend 3y ago

> I can look out my window and straight into my neighbour's bathroom. Is that public information? Yes. And there have been numerous court cases confirming this (why we have paparazzi taking topless photos on people on private beaches from public vantage points). I think this is a feature, not a bug, as without a straightforward rule I don’t know how society solves this without causing more harm. If something is public, it’s public. Restricting you from looking in your neighbors open window isn’t something that can realistically be “fixed.” Other than if I don’t want my neighbor to look in, I draw the blinds. This works for paupers and billionaires. If I don’t want people to see things, I don’t make them public. I can’t set a limit of “only people making less than $20k are allowed to view this.”

dawnerd 3y ago
What if someone leaks info is that public now? What if someone shares my private info without permission? Should Google be allowed to train on it? How would their systems know? What about pirated other illegal content? The lines are not quite as clear to computers.
- prepend 3y ago
  IANAL, but leaking is a crime, accessing once public is not. There was a lot of this back during the height of Wikileaks where there were questions about reading classified material being a crime. It is, but once it’s leaked, it is no longer classified, so public. So the crime would be on the leaker, not on Google for training on it.
  - dawnerd 3y ago
    But the question is should google train against it not if it’s legal. Just because it’s public doesn’t mean you have the right to use it, I think that’s the real question we’ll need to figure out.
  - snerbles 3y ago
    IANAL either, but I have held a security clearance and this is very dangerous advice. Unless explicitly declassified the leaked information remains classified, and those who hold security clearances are legally required to avoid all classified information outside of their need-to-know [0]. Now if you have never held a U.S. security clearance, you're less likely to be prosecuted but the history and precedent is murky [1]. The average Joe Sixpack checking out Wikileaks is probably safe, but if I were a journalist publishing the next round of Pentagon Papers I would much rather have a small army of lawyers and a friend or two in Congress. EDIT - Google has federal contracts, so they are probably bound by similar agreements to at least make an effort to avoid any such leaks in their training data for public-facing models. [0] https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to-federal-workers-If-you-read-WikiLeaks-you-re-breaking-the-law https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to... [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/22/521009791/q-could-u-s-prosecute-reporters-for-classified-scoops-a-maybe https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/22/521009791...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DeusExMachina 3y ago

I don't think the definition of public is even enough here. Open-source code is public but covered by specific licenses. That's still legally undefined, but there are already ongoing lawsuits.

tmaly 3y ago

what about Google books? Do they get a pass with this?

bhickey 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
- tmaly 3y ago
  But using it to train an LLM and profiting off said LLM is different than providing a public service.

pessimizer 3y ago

> "But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!" 13 years ago, we treated cookssource.com like they were rubes, but they were just too early and too small. "The web is considered 'public domain'" https://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html https://illadore.livejournal.com/30674.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1868736 ----- A Follow-Up to "The Web is Public Domain" https://web.archive.org/web/20101112141752/http://www.cookssource.com:80/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101112141752/http://www.cookss... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911977 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911977