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> I don’t think so: I think this is a combination of confusing wording and the eternal vagueness of what the term “consent” means in a world where everyone agre

> I don’t think so: I think this is a combination of confusing wording and the eternal vagueness of what the term “consent” means in a world where everyone agrees to the terms and conditions of everything without reading them. Bullshit. Consent means consent. There is no confusion here. Nothing is vague. This is explicit fraud. I feel like every day now, I'm reading an article where the problem is obviously just fraud. Fraud has always been illegal. When did we stop prosecuting it? Why aren't we talking about that every day?

samsolomon 3y ago
If you're not a subscriber, Matt Levine has a running theme of articles where "Everything is securities fraud." It's not free to read his articles on Bloomberg, but his newsletter, Money Stuff, is free and one of my favorite daily reads. https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
The entire basis of the current generation of AI is in stolen materials. Stolen writing, stolen art, stolen music, all of it taken because it was "publicly available" meaning "there was nothing in existing law that said we couldn't take it for training a learning model." Now they've done the same with Dropbox contents. AI is very cool technology. The incredible overstepping of any and all ethics with regard to getting training data, just all of the data from any source as fast as possible right now, in this mad dash to create it at all costs is not and should mandate a complete restart on behalf of the people behind it. For this one, and for so many other ethical lapses on the part of OpenAI, the models as they exist are tainted beyond any ethical use as far as I'm concerned. If your product uses this stuff, you are not getting one red cent from me for it. Period, paragraph.
- simonw 3y ago
  > Now they've done the same with Dropbox contents. This is what I mean by the "trust crisis". Dropbox very clearly deny that Dropbox content is being used to train AI models, by them or by OpenAI. You don't believe them, because you don't trust them.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    It's almost like acting completely unethically in the public space has consequences or something
- andy99 3y ago
  This is a silly argument. Public sharing on the internet has nothing in common with storing on a private storage service. Posting something online you are literally inviting people to look at it, and there is copyright law that governs how it can be copied. You can argue training AI models on internet data violates copyright (though it almost certainly doesn't) or that the law needs to be changed. But none of that has anything to do with training on private data. It's the same kind of "you wouldn't steal a car" false comparison.
  - ToucanLoucan 3y ago
    > Public sharing on the internet has nothing in common with storing on a private storage service. No shit. > Posting something online you are literally inviting people to look at it, Yes, PEOPLE. Posting things for people to see is why the Internet exists, is why USENET was created, is why web forums were created, is why social media was created, is why 9/10ths of the Internet as we know it today was brought into creation. It was not put there so people who do not know any of those people and do not give a rats ass about what they made could take millions of images, writings, and sounds and shove them into their product without their consent for purposes it was never meant for so they could automate art. That is categorically not what any of that is for, and you, and everyone else making this tired point damn well know that. If you have no issue at all with your creative output being used to train data models, more power to you! That's how consent works! You consent and that's completely, 100% fine. That consent should not have been presumed as it was, and even if you assume complete and total innocence on the part of the AI creators, once it became extremely fucking obvious that tons, and tons, and tons of creatives absolutely would not have consented if asked, then their data models should've been re-trained with that misused data removed. That is the ETHICAL thing to do: when someone says "hey I really don't like what you're doing with my material, please stop" you STOP, not because that's legally binding, not because you'll be sued, not because you're infringing copyrights, but because you have a fundamental respect for your fellow human being who says "I don't like this, please don't do it" and then you, you know, don't do it. Unless of course what you actually are is an ethics-free for-profit entity that needs to get to market as soon as possible with a product to sell that you probably can't be sued over, in which case you tell those people who's work your product could not exist without to eat shit, and proceed anyway. Which is basically exactly what happened and continues to happen. And before you even go there to the "well how could they ask for the entire dataset's contents" I DON'T CARE. I'm not the one doing this, this is not my problem to solve, just because the ethical way to do a thing is hard, time consuming, and/or expensive or otherwise difficult, you don't get to just waltz past the ethics involved, even if you're a research project! I personally wouldn't want to get permission from a few million artists to use their work in this way, I don't think most of them would be comfortable with it, and even if they were, I don't really want to do that, it sounds like a ton of work. SO I DIDN'T.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  It's well past time for the end of the Digital Millennium of Copyright. The problem here is that these corporations are given carte blanche to make any derivative works they want. They get the exclusive freedom to ignore copyright law. The rest of us don't. The worst part is that they get to turn around and say their models are protected by copyright! This is copyright laundering. There are only 2 reasonable avenues for us to react: 1. Make "AI" companies respect existing copyright law when compiling training datasets. 2. Get rid of digital copyright for everyone. I vote option #2.
jrmg 3y ago
See also e.g. YouTube advertisements for financial schemes, supplements, health devices - and all the products that just don’t do what they say they do. In a conversation online about this recently, someone said (paraphrasing) ‘Government should regulate this!’ - but there are already regulations about all of this! It’s fraud! Fraud is literally paying for YouTube (and to varying extents a lot of the rest of the web) and nothing is being done about it. I fear that it’s just considered so normal now that it will take a very long time to stop. If existing regulations about fraud had been enforced when the fields were nascent, establishing norms that it was just as unacceptable ‘with tech’ as it was before, I think it would be a lot less widespread now.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  Here's my advice: stop coloring our discussions with those norms. We all expect the courts to give the benefit of the doubt. The problem is that we echo that expectation in our discussions. We are not the courts! We should be loud and direct with our criticism. There is no doubt here. I refuse to give corporations that benefit.

samsolomon 3y ago

If you're not a subscriber, Matt Levine has a running theme of articles where "Everything is securities fraud." It's not free to read his articles on Bloomberg, but his newsletter, Money Stuff, is free and one of my favorite daily reads. https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff

ToucanLoucan 3y ago

The entire basis of the current generation of AI is in stolen materials. Stolen writing, stolen art, stolen music, all of it taken because it was "publicly available" meaning "there was nothing in existing law that said we couldn't take it for training a learning model." Now they've done the same with Dropbox contents. AI is very cool technology. The incredible overstepping of any and all ethics with regard to getting training data, just all of the data from any source as fast as possible right now, in this mad dash to create it at all costs is not and should mandate a complete restart on behalf of the people behind it. For this one, and for so many other ethical lapses on the part of OpenAI, the models as they exist are tainted beyond any ethical use as far as I'm concerned. If your product uses this stuff, you are not getting one red cent from me for it. Period, paragraph.

simonw 3y ago
> Now they've done the same with Dropbox contents. This is what I mean by the "trust crisis". Dropbox very clearly deny that Dropbox content is being used to train AI models, by them or by OpenAI. You don't believe them, because you don't trust them.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  It's almost like acting completely unethically in the public space has consequences or something
andy99 3y ago
This is a silly argument. Public sharing on the internet has nothing in common with storing on a private storage service. Posting something online you are literally inviting people to look at it, and there is copyright law that governs how it can be copied. You can argue training AI models on internet data violates copyright (though it almost certainly doesn't) or that the law needs to be changed. But none of that has anything to do with training on private data. It's the same kind of "you wouldn't steal a car" false comparison.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > Public sharing on the internet has nothing in common with storing on a private storage service. No shit. > Posting something online you are literally inviting people to look at it, Yes, PEOPLE. Posting things for people to see is why the Internet exists, is why USENET was created, is why web forums were created, is why social media was created, is why 9/10ths of the Internet as we know it today was brought into creation. It was not put there so people who do not know any of those people and do not give a rats ass about what they made could take millions of images, writings, and sounds and shove them into their product without their consent for purposes it was never meant for so they could automate art. That is categorically not what any of that is for, and you, and everyone else making this tired point damn well know that. If you have no issue at all with your creative output being used to train data models, more power to you! That's how consent works! You consent and that's completely, 100% fine. That consent should not have been presumed as it was, and even if you assume complete and total innocence on the part of the AI creators, once it became extremely fucking obvious that tons, and tons, and tons of creatives absolutely would not have consented if asked, then their data models should've been re-trained with that misused data removed. That is the ETHICAL thing to do: when someone says "hey I really don't like what you're doing with my material, please stop" you STOP, not because that's legally binding, not because you'll be sued, not because you're infringing copyrights, but because you have a fundamental respect for your fellow human being who says "I don't like this, please don't do it" and then you, you know, don't do it. Unless of course what you actually are is an ethics-free for-profit entity that needs to get to market as soon as possible with a product to sell that you probably can't be sued over, in which case you tell those people who's work your product could not exist without to eat shit, and proceed anyway. Which is basically exactly what happened and continues to happen. And before you even go there to the "well how could they ask for the entire dataset's contents" I DON'T CARE. I'm not the one doing this, this is not my problem to solve, just because the ethical way to do a thing is hard, time consuming, and/or expensive or otherwise difficult, you don't get to just waltz past the ethics involved, even if you're a research project! I personally wouldn't want to get permission from a few million artists to use their work in this way, I don't think most of them would be comfortable with it, and even if they were, I don't really want to do that, it sounds like a ton of work. SO I DIDN'T.
thomastjeffery 3y ago
It's well past time for the end of the Digital Millennium of Copyright. The problem here is that these corporations are given carte blanche to make any derivative works they want. They get the exclusive freedom to ignore copyright law. The rest of us don't. The worst part is that they get to turn around and say their models are protected by copyright! This is copyright laundering. There are only 2 reasonable avenues for us to react: 1. Make "AI" companies respect existing copyright law when compiling training datasets. 2. Get rid of digital copyright for everyone. I vote option #2.

jrmg 3y ago

See also e.g. YouTube advertisements for financial schemes, supplements, health devices - and all the products that just don’t do what they say they do. In a conversation online about this recently, someone said (paraphrasing) ‘Government should regulate this!’ - but there are already regulations about all of this! It’s fraud! Fraud is literally paying for YouTube (and to varying extents a lot of the rest of the web) and nothing is being done about it. I fear that it’s just considered so normal now that it will take a very long time to stop. If existing regulations about fraud had been enforced when the fields were nascent, establishing norms that it was just as unacceptable ‘with tech’ as it was before, I think it would be a lot less widespread now.

thomastjeffery 3y ago
Here's my advice: stop coloring our discussions with those norms. We all expect the courts to give the benefit of the doubt. The problem is that we echo that expectation in our discussions. We are not the courts! We should be loud and direct with our criticism. There is no doubt here. I refuse to give corporations that benefit.