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Imagining an opt-in policy highlights how unethical these AI data-harvesting schemes really are. It's blindingly obvious that almost nobody would actively choos

Imagining an opt-in policy highlights how unethical these AI data-harvesting schemes really are. It's blindingly obvious that almost nobody would actively choose to donate their work to enrich AI companies without getting anything in return.

resizeitplz 3y ago
Guess I'm 'almost nobody'. I see zero issue with AI farming Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, and the like - publicly accessible forums. The value to me was in the discussion. It's happened; I've extracted my value from that engagement. If an AI company can also extract value from that collection of discussions, it costs me nothing and I expect no compensation. Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  In the US, everything you write anywhere online is copyrighted by you, unless you sign a copyright assignment agreement. It's automatic any time you put an expression into a fixed form, and there is no way to revoke that copyright.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    As I understand it copyright has failed. Or rather we are into an age of naked double standards where courts will enforce the copyright of big-tech against you for "stealing" a movie, but will not enforce your copyright against big-tech for "stealing" your data for its AI. EDIT: some links [0,1] [0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaws-artists-lawsuit-against-ai-companies-2023-07-19/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaw... [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/artists-copyright-infringement-case-ai-art-generators-1235632929/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/art...
    - danaris 3y ago
      Copyright has absolutely not "failed". Copyright is still deeply important to prevent behemoths from just straight-up taking stuff individuals wrote and profiting from it with no consequences. For instance, without copyright, traditional publishers could just take everything the authors they currently contract with have written, and every other current author, and publish it without paying the authors a cent. ML training is a legal gray area right now, because it's a new thing, and we haven't had time to properly sit down and both understand what its effects are, and how it should be treated legally. It is possible that this process, when it ends up happening, will be captured by corruption; it is possible that it won't. But using the current frustrations and anger about ML training as evidence that copyright has "failed" is a vast oversimplification that ignores the very real good that copyright does in our society.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        Fair comments. Please allow me to rephrase that. It's failing right now to protect millions/billions of people, because we've decided that it's "legal gray area right now". Maybe it should be, I don't know. I mean maybe it's time we said bye bye to copyright? There could be flip sides. If the world decides that ML sidesteps copyright then I look forward to the entire corpus of LibGen, SciHub etc being legally released as open models and the overnight demise of Elsevier et al. (I once wrote a fiction about that [0]) My objection here is to seeing the clear wishes of the majority being trodden over roughshod. [0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
        danaris 3y ago
        > I mean maybe it's time we said bye bye to copyright? This is exactly the kind of oversimplified, baby-with-the-bathwater proposal I was talking about. No, we should not "say bye bye to copyright". We should actually take the harder, more complex steps, requiring actual critical thinking and analysis, to fix the problem, rather than just pretending that a one-step grand gesture will be a magic bullet.
- acbullen 3y ago
  Inevitably there will be copyrighted images, audio, and text mixed in with random social updates and discussions. It should be on the LLM builder to seek active consent, rather than everyone else to be vigilant and/or sue to get their work out of the model's data.
- digging 3y ago
  > Guess I'm 'almost nobody'. When you put it that way, yes, you obviously are. So is every other individual.
- lizknope 3y ago
  I understand that the author is mad and wants things to be opt-in. But I also think the author is smart enough to know that the tech industry understands consent just fine. It just doesn't care. twitter and reddit will soon be bots talking to bots (if they aren't already) so the AI can train on that.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story. Copyright also happens to be opt-out. You have to explicitly say “this is not copyrighted” for copyright to stop applying. See your comment and my reply? Both copyrighted. Right now. As soon as we hit publish we started to own copyright. There is an EULA somewhere on HN that probably says we give HN implicit permission to host this content in perpetuity and can even make it available in APIs, show it to bots, etc. But that’s not the same as no copyright. If somebody who is not HN wants to screenshot this comment and publish it in a book, they in theory have to find us and ask for permission.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Copyright also happens to be opt-out. You have to explicitly say “this is not copyrighted” for copyright to stop applying. This isn't possible under US copyright law. You can say "this is not copyrighted" all you want, but it's still copyrighted. The closest you can get to voluntarily putting something in the public domain is to refuse to take enforcement actions against violations of your copyright.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Do you take issue with search engines indexing your comments, making them discoverable, displaying them in search results? Possibly near ads?
    - orev 3y ago
      Search engines link back to the original sources, making them discoverable which is the “payment” for allowing it. That’s a very different use than an AI that doesn’t even know where the original content came from and provides nothing back to the original creator.
- AdamH12113 3y ago
  The article isn't talking about public discussion forums at all, it's talking about WordPress and its owner, Automattic. The article is a blog post on a WordPress-hosted blog. It then goes on to talk about consent in software in general. Personally, I'm not really okay with what you're calling public forum harvesting either. I've put a lot of work into Stack Exchange answers and I am not okay with a for-profit company recycling and possibly outright regurgitating that work without attribution. (The latter would be a flagrant violation of CC BY-SA, of course.)
- alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
  > I see zero issue with AI farming Stack Overflow, > Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story. All post on Stack Overflow are still copyright of respective posters. They are offered publicly under Creative Commons license that require attribution.
AlienRobot 3y ago
Think of it this way. If Google makes 300 billions per year scrapping 1 trillion webpages, how much money should it pay for each webpage it scraped? There's a point in bulk scraping that the logistics of giving people real money for data makes no sense. The payout out be to small to waste time thinking about. And the fees of costs of paying anyone in the world would be higher than the actual amount being paid! I'm not saying it's morally right, I'm saying the only way to be commercially successful is to try to get away with it.

resizeitplz 3y ago

Guess I'm 'almost nobody'. I see zero issue with AI farming Stack Overflow, Twitter, Reddit, and the like - publicly accessible forums. The value to me was in the discussion. It's happened; I've extracted my value from that engagement. If an AI company can also extract value from that collection of discussions, it costs me nothing and I expect no compensation. Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story.

JohnFen 3y ago
In the US, everything you write anywhere online is copyrighted by you, unless you sign a copyright assignment agreement. It's automatic any time you put an expression into a fixed form, and there is no way to revoke that copyright.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  As I understand it copyright has failed. Or rather we are into an age of naked double standards where courts will enforce the copyright of big-tech against you for "stealing" a movie, but will not enforce your copyright against big-tech for "stealing" your data for its AI. EDIT: some links [0,1] [0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaws-artists-lawsuit-against-ai-companies-2023-07-19/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-judge-finds-flaw... [1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/artists-copyright-infringement-case-ai-art-generators-1235632929/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/art...
  - danaris 3y ago
    Copyright has absolutely not "failed". Copyright is still deeply important to prevent behemoths from just straight-up taking stuff individuals wrote and profiting from it with no consequences. For instance, without copyright, traditional publishers could just take everything the authors they currently contract with have written, and every other current author, and publish it without paying the authors a cent. ML training is a legal gray area right now, because it's a new thing, and we haven't had time to properly sit down and both understand what its effects are, and how it should be treated legally. It is possible that this process, when it ends up happening, will be captured by corruption; it is possible that it won't. But using the current frustrations and anger about ML training as evidence that copyright has "failed" is a vast oversimplification that ignores the very real good that copyright does in our society.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      Fair comments. Please allow me to rephrase that. It's failing right now to protect millions/billions of people, because we've decided that it's "legal gray area right now". Maybe it should be, I don't know. I mean maybe it's time we said bye bye to copyright? There could be flip sides. If the world decides that ML sidesteps copyright then I look forward to the entire corpus of LibGen, SciHub etc being legally released as open models and the overnight demise of Elsevier et al. (I once wrote a fiction about that [0]) My objection here is to seeing the clear wishes of the majority being trodden over roughshod. [0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-information-unchained-and-even-schoolgirls-win-nobel-prizes https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
      - danaris 3y ago
        > I mean maybe it's time we said bye bye to copyright? This is exactly the kind of oversimplified, baby-with-the-bathwater proposal I was talking about. No, we should not "say bye bye to copyright". We should actually take the harder, more complex steps, requiring actual critical thinking and analysis, to fix the problem, rather than just pretending that a one-step grand gesture will be a magic bullet.
acbullen 3y ago
Inevitably there will be copyrighted images, audio, and text mixed in with random social updates and discussions. It should be on the LLM builder to seek active consent, rather than everyone else to be vigilant and/or sue to get their work out of the model's data.
digging 3y ago
> Guess I'm 'almost nobody'. When you put it that way, yes, you obviously are. So is every other individual.
lizknope 3y ago
I understand that the author is mad and wants things to be opt-in. But I also think the author is smart enough to know that the tech industry understands consent just fine. It just doesn't care. twitter and reddit will soon be bots talking to bots (if they aren't already) so the AI can train on that.
Swizec 3y ago
> Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story. Copyright also happens to be opt-out. You have to explicitly say “this is not copyrighted” for copyright to stop applying. See your comment and my reply? Both copyrighted. Right now. As soon as we hit publish we started to own copyright. There is an EULA somewhere on HN that probably says we give HN implicit permission to host this content in perpetuity and can even make it available in APIs, show it to bots, etc. But that’s not the same as no copyright. If somebody who is not HN wants to screenshot this comment and publish it in a book, they in theory have to find us and ask for permission.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Copyright also happens to be opt-out. You have to explicitly say “this is not copyrighted” for copyright to stop applying. This isn't possible under US copyright law. You can say "this is not copyrighted" all you want, but it's still copyrighted. The closest you can get to voluntarily putting something in the public domain is to refuse to take enforcement actions against violations of your copyright.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Do you take issue with search engines indexing your comments, making them discoverable, displaying them in search results? Possibly near ads?
  - orev 3y ago
    Search engines link back to the original sources, making them discoverable which is the “payment” for allowing it. That’s a very different use than an AI that doesn’t even know where the original content came from and provides nothing back to the original creator.
AdamH12113 3y ago
The article isn't talking about public discussion forums at all, it's talking about WordPress and its owner, Automattic. The article is a blog post on a WordPress-hosted blog. It then goes on to talk about consent in software in general. Personally, I'm not really okay with what you're calling public forum harvesting either. I've put a lot of work into Stack Exchange answers and I am not okay with a for-profit company recycling and possibly outright regurgitating that work without attribution. (The latter would be a flagrant violation of CC BY-SA, of course.)
alwaysbeconsing 3y ago
> I see zero issue with AI farming Stack Overflow, > Thought AI companies farming copyrighted work on the other hand, that's a different story. All post on Stack Overflow are still copyright of respective posters. They are offered publicly under Creative Commons license that require attribution.

AlienRobot 3y ago

Think of it this way. If Google makes 300 billions per year scrapping 1 trillion webpages, how much money should it pay for each webpage it scraped? There's a point in bulk scraping that the logistics of giving people real money for data makes no sense. The payout out be to small to waste time thinking about. And the fees of costs of paying anyone in the world would be higher than the actual amount being paid! I'm not saying it's morally right, I'm saying the only way to be commercially successful is to try to get away with it.