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So are we just going to let OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others to just steal the whole internet, including videos on YouTube, and train their models

So are we just going to let OpenAI, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others to just steal the whole internet, including videos on YouTube, and train their models for free without compensating creators? Or will they get away with it because there were no laws that prohibited their behaviour?

jsheard 3y ago
Adobe is pretty much banking on the "scrape everything" approach getting too bogged down in legal problems to be commercially viable in the long term. They're going out of their way to only train on licensed material so they (and Getty Images) will be the last ones standing if the worst case scenario happens for the companies who thought they could just take everything, and in the meantime they get the business of risk-adverse customers who don't want to chance it until it's settled one way or the other. It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I applaud their approach, since it's obviously in line with traditional concepts such as fucking paying someone for their time and work.
  - pavlov 3y ago
    Still, it's possible to end up in a situation where people are getting paid and in theory it's an improvement over a previous lawless IP situation, but in practice it still leaves creators in the cold. That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      It's better to be good than not be perfect in the face of being bad.
  - cma 3y ago
    Didn't they quickly change terms before people knew what was going on with the Stock AI stugg, and only do any press for it after it was available but too late to opt out?
- paxys 3y ago
  And by being the first mover they get to dictate prices as well. Content creators will sell for whatever because the alternative is $0. Once more companies get involved and start bidding the value of these catalogs will undoubtedly go up.
- andy_ppp 3y ago
  It’s amazing how quickly laws get changed when there’s potentially billions of dollars that can be extracted.
- Hoasi 3y ago
  Sound strategy by Adobe.
- doctorpangloss 3y ago
  Adobe’s stuff isn’t only trained on licensed material. They are as fucked as everyone else. There doesn’t exist a LLM trained only on expressly licensed data that works well enough for the image diffusion conditioning task. So unless they made some kind of huge scientific discovery, which they didn’t, they are using a text model like T5 or CLIP to achieve the “text” part of “text to image”, which of course is trained on not expressly licensed data.
- chriskanan 3y ago
  I'm guessing they will then lobby to ban open source AI models, especially their usage in commercial applications. One would need a huge bank account to create models in the future. I think this would have a chilling effect on the AI ecosystem. In essence it's a form of regulatory capture.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    You already need a huge bank account to create models, the (quality) open source ones are all hand-me-downs from companies burning through huge stacks of investor cash and giving away the spoils. It should go without saying that that won't last.
    - artninja1988 3y ago
      I mean it's in the crown sourcing range for diffusion models and going to get cheaper. It currently costs 50k to retrain stable diffusion 2 (https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2 https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2). So yeah, mandatory licensing of data on the open web would absolutely kill university projects and small startups. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say
      - jsheard 3y ago
        That's 50k if you already know the exact architecture you're going to use, and the exact training data you're going to use, and nail it all on the first try. Multiply that by however many failed attempts it takes while experimenting with new ideas, especially when the corporate players stop being so eager to publish the finer details of their research, and that 50k could very quickly turn into millions.
        artninja1988 3y ago
        Yeah, it's not going to be SOTA but existing models are already good enough for a reasonable portion of use cases. Even if they lag behind it's important to have free models.
kozikow 3y ago
Nono, let stealing the internet first, generate synthetic training data, and then outlaw it to ensure no one else catches up.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Is there going to be a new term called "Data Laundering"? You create the synthetic data, move it through 10s of entities and then buy it back cheaply from an entity.
  - datadrivenangel 3y ago
    It's the fireside monopoly approach. Break the law so you can undercut the real producers, and then buy the rights when they're broke and everything works out for you!
  - winstonprivacy 3y ago
    Data Laundering is an old term... I was using in more than a decade ago in talks about how unethically gathered private data was being sold to Israeli companies, who then licensed it back to US corporations. It was (probably still is) a way to side step privacy laws.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
This is why open models trained with disregard for IP are important. It’s going to happen anyway, the tech can either be free to everyone so we all benefit or behind a paywall. Those are your two options there isn’t a 3rd if we’re talking reality not fantasy.
kristopolous 3y ago
It's called enclosing the commons and the answer is a resounding "yes!"
deadbabe 3y ago
Most of a creator’s content is consumed for free as is by their audience. Their compensation arrives in the form of payments from a few large subscribers or from an ad distribution platform or other such sponsorship deals. I’m not sure why you and others think that using someone’s work as inspiration for creating some new work requires payment. Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme, or using a sound for a reel or a TikTok? A lot of these creators are just creating shit they saw someone else create.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme I suspect that, if the image in the meme is copyrighted, the answer is "yes." I haven't come across too many memes with Mickey Mouse, but I do see the occasional Marvel one (I have forwarded these, myself).
  - deadbabe 3y ago
    Under the OP’s logic, you and everyone who shared those memes owes money. Everyone.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      Yup. Welcome to the RIAA's worldview. It can get nasty.
  - qeternity 3y ago
    There is a little something called "fair use".
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      Yeah...that gets fuzzy. Satire of the work is allowed, but I don't think using the work, itself, in satire of something else, is allowed. I think that the example a lot of folks use is the "Pissing Calvin" decal. Watterson never allowed any commercialization of his characters. Every "Pissing Calvin" decal is actually a copyright violation, but I think that they never enforced it, so it may be considered "OK" to use, as the copyright has been allowed to wither. But IANAL. Things get sticky, here.
bobcostas55 3y ago
You know what, I _would_ download a car.
djeastm 3y ago
I think the strategy is to succeed at all costs now then pay out a fine or settlement as a cost of doing business later when it's a fraction of their profits. Seems to be how things go.
aqme28 3y ago
> train their models for free without compensating creators Isn't $3/minute exactly the compensation for creators you're looking for?
- chinathrow 3y ago
  Why would that be a fair price?
  - aqme28 3y ago
    They're offering that price to creators. Beyond that, you're getting into the philosophical argument of what defines a fair price.
  - SJC_Hacker 3y ago
    Because its the highest bid?
slyall 3y ago
Google owns youtube. I'd be surprised if their user agreement doesn't allow them to train on the uploads. Same with Apple and Facebook. I'm not sure a dozen companies (before consultation and licensing) having control of 90-something percent of their world's content is a good idea either
glimshe 3y ago
The article is paywalled, but isn't paying for videos the very opposite of "stealing" and "without compensating"?
CameronFromCA 3y ago
We can only hope so.
rchaud 3y ago
Open borders for me, paywalls and perpetual surveillance for thee.
rchaud 3y ago
Open borders for me, DMCA enforcement for thee.

jsheard 3y ago

Adobe is pretty much banking on the "scrape everything" approach getting too bogged down in legal problems to be commercially viable in the long term. They're going out of their way to only train on licensed material so they (and Getty Images) will be the last ones standing if the worst case scenario happens for the companies who thought they could just take everything, and in the meantime they get the business of risk-adverse customers who don't want to chance it until it's settled one way or the other. It's a decent lobbying tactic too - companies like OpenAI claim their technology can only exist with unrestricted scraping, and requiring them to license training data would kill the whole industry in the crib, but Adobe and Getty can point to their own products as existence proofs that it can be done but OpenAI just doesn't want to.

Dalewyn 3y ago
I applaud their approach, since it's obviously in line with traditional concepts such as fucking paying someone for their time and work.
- pavlov 3y ago
  Still, it's possible to end up in a situation where people are getting paid and in theory it's an improvement over a previous lawless IP situation, but in practice it still leaves creators in the cold. That's basically what happened with Spotify. Artists are getting paid something for streaming, but it's fractions of pennies on the dollars they used to make from music sales.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    It's better to be good than not be perfect in the face of being bad.
- cma 3y ago
  Didn't they quickly change terms before people knew what was going on with the Stock AI stugg, and only do any press for it after it was available but too late to opt out?
paxys 3y ago
And by being the first mover they get to dictate prices as well. Content creators will sell for whatever because the alternative is $0. Once more companies get involved and start bidding the value of these catalogs will undoubtedly go up.
andy_ppp 3y ago
It’s amazing how quickly laws get changed when there’s potentially billions of dollars that can be extracted.
Hoasi 3y ago
Sound strategy by Adobe.
doctorpangloss 3y ago
Adobe’s stuff isn’t only trained on licensed material. They are as fucked as everyone else. There doesn’t exist a LLM trained only on expressly licensed data that works well enough for the image diffusion conditioning task. So unless they made some kind of huge scientific discovery, which they didn’t, they are using a text model like T5 or CLIP to achieve the “text” part of “text to image”, which of course is trained on not expressly licensed data.
chriskanan 3y ago
I'm guessing they will then lobby to ban open source AI models, especially their usage in commercial applications. One would need a huge bank account to create models in the future. I think this would have a chilling effect on the AI ecosystem. In essence it's a form of regulatory capture.
- jsheard 3y ago
  You already need a huge bank account to create models, the (quality) open source ones are all hand-me-downs from companies burning through huge stacks of investor cash and giving away the spoils. It should go without saying that that won't last.
  - artninja1988 3y ago
    I mean it's in the crown sourcing range for diffusion models and going to get cheaper. It currently costs 50k to retrain stable diffusion 2 (https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2 https://www.databricks.com/blog/stable-diffusion-2). So yeah, mandatory licensing of data on the open web would absolutely kill university projects and small startups. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say
    - jsheard 3y ago
      That's 50k if you already know the exact architecture you're going to use, and the exact training data you're going to use, and nail it all on the first try. Multiply that by however many failed attempts it takes while experimenting with new ideas, especially when the corporate players stop being so eager to publish the finer details of their research, and that 50k could very quickly turn into millions.
      - artninja1988 3y ago
        Yeah, it's not going to be SOTA but existing models are already good enough for a reasonable portion of use cases. Even if they lag behind it's important to have free models.

kozikow 3y ago

Nono, let stealing the internet first, generate synthetic training data, and then outlaw it to ensure no one else catches up.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Is there going to be a new term called "Data Laundering"? You create the synthetic data, move it through 10s of entities and then buy it back cheaply from an entity.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  It's the fireside monopoly approach. Break the law so you can undercut the real producers, and then buy the rights when they're broke and everything works out for you!
- winstonprivacy 3y ago
  Data Laundering is an old term... I was using in more than a decade ago in talks about how unethically gathered private data was being sold to Israeli companies, who then licensed it back to US corporations. It was (probably still is) a way to side step privacy laws.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

This is why open models trained with disregard for IP are important. It’s going to happen anyway, the tech can either be free to everyone so we all benefit or behind a paywall. Those are your two options there isn’t a 3rd if we’re talking reality not fantasy.

kristopolous 3y ago

It's called enclosing the commons and the answer is a resounding "yes!"

deadbabe 3y ago

Most of a creator’s content is consumed for free as is by their audience. Their compensation arrives in the form of payments from a few large subscribers or from an ad distribution platform or other such sponsorship deals. I’m not sure why you and others think that using someone’s work as inspiration for creating some new work requires payment. Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme, or using a sound for a reel or a TikTok? A lot of these creators are just creating shit they saw someone else create.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> Are we required to pay someone when sharing a meme I suspect that, if the image in the meme is copyrighted, the answer is "yes." I haven't come across too many memes with Mickey Mouse, but I do see the occasional Marvel one (I have forwarded these, myself).
- deadbabe 3y ago
  Under the OP’s logic, you and everyone who shared those memes owes money. Everyone.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Yup. Welcome to the RIAA's worldview. It can get nasty.
- qeternity 3y ago
  There is a little something called "fair use".
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Yeah...that gets fuzzy. Satire of the work is allowed, but I don't think using the work, itself, in satire of something else, is allowed. I think that the example a lot of folks use is the "Pissing Calvin" decal. Watterson never allowed any commercialization of his characters. Every "Pissing Calvin" decal is actually a copyright violation, but I think that they never enforced it, so it may be considered "OK" to use, as the copyright has been allowed to wither. But IANAL. Things get sticky, here.

bobcostas55 3y ago

You know what, I _would_ download a car.

djeastm 3y ago

I think the strategy is to succeed at all costs now then pay out a fine or settlement as a cost of doing business later when it's a fraction of their profits. Seems to be how things go.

aqme28 3y ago

> train their models for free without compensating creators Isn't $3/minute exactly the compensation for creators you're looking for?

chinathrow 3y ago
Why would that be a fair price?
- aqme28 3y ago
  They're offering that price to creators. Beyond that, you're getting into the philosophical argument of what defines a fair price.
- SJC_Hacker 3y ago
  Because its the highest bid?

slyall 3y ago

Google owns youtube. I'd be surprised if their user agreement doesn't allow them to train on the uploads. Same with Apple and Facebook. I'm not sure a dozen companies (before consultation and licensing) having control of 90-something percent of their world's content is a good idea either

glimshe 3y ago

The article is paywalled, but isn't paying for videos the very opposite of "stealing" and "without compensating"?

CameronFromCA 3y ago

We can only hope so.

rchaud 3y ago

Open borders for me, paywalls and perpetual surveillance for thee.

rchaud 3y ago

Open borders for me, DMCA enforcement for thee.