8 ms·
Microsoft CEO of AI Your online content is 'freeware' fodder for training models
- htthbjk 2y ago[flagged]
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoBut it’s not like LinkedIn now likes you to scrape them today. Scraping for me, but not for thee.
- polotics 2y ago[flagged]
- courseofaction 2y agoEat the rich.
- xkqras 2y ago"That's the future Suleyman anticipates. "The economics of information are about to radically change because we can reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost," he said." The cynicism is mind-blowing. Artificial Stupidities have created exactly zero knowledge so far, which is why companies like Microsoft now roll out people like Suleyman who openly admits that the DMCA is only for the rich with lawyers. And steal and repackage "content" from altruistic creators. This one might bite back Microsoft. If any case goes to the Supreme Court, I'm not sure that they'll be amused by this line of logic.
- victorbojica 2y agoI'm not saying it's not cynical, but it's surely not wrong. He just said what everyone in the business was already thinking.
- torginus 2y agoIt's exactly how democracies backslide into authoritarianism. First they violate the law. Then they ignore it. Then ignoring it becomes the new norm. Then the new norm becomes the new law.
- victorbojica 2y agoNot saying it's a good thing either. And what you're saying it's unfortunately true. We need people who really value creation, democracy, etc and not pure capitalism, profit optimization, etc.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThe Chevron repeal in a nutshell. And it'll keep happening if nothing can keep it in check.
- lucianbr 2y agoDo Mistral and xAI get to freely scrape the output of Microsoft ChatGPT? I for one, think either answer to this question will turn out bad, for all of them. Drowning out creativity on the internet with remixed word salad will only be profitable for a short while. After which, people will start looking for human-created stuff, and avoid ai as much as possible. And slowly, it will become possible. Just like adblockers slowly advance.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoPeople may think they want non-AI stuff, but they just want things created with intention. AI is just a tool, and the very best creators will leverage it to take art to a new level.
- lucianbr 2y agoWell this new level doesn't seem to be here yet, so I'll believe it when I see it. Crypto also "will change the world", except it didn't, for all the confidence of its supporters. Claims about great things in the future are a dime a million.
- m463 2y agoCould Microsoft just ignore copyright on radio transmissions or broadcast tv too?
- dspillett 2y agoNo, not easily, because those can afford legal teams that the rest of us can't.
- hunglee2 2y agoThree C's are missing from this - consultation, consent and compensation. We post regularly online without any expectation of payment but then we never considered that the output could or would be used for commercial purpose. The value of our collective output is being captured by a very small elite. Not sure what we can do about this, other than support alternative eco-systems at least to ensure that intra-corporate competition might keep prices low
- iamacyborg 2y agoA good start might be to start voting with your wallet. Stop using products from companies that have trained their models in this way.
- criddell 2y agoAnd start voting with your attention too. By participating in open services online (like HN), you are actively participating in building a corpus of text that will be used by AI companies.
- klardc 2y agoFor software engineers it is hard to protest in public since Microsoft controls GitHub and many "free" OSS projects where most real contributors have left after Microsoft installed a small ruling class of otherwise unremarkable software engineers. For Hollywood writers, artists, musicians, book authors it is much easier to protest. You could go to Redmond for a couple of weekends, camp on "One True Microsoft Way" and protest. And the NYT would cover this, since its interests are aligned with the protesters.
- courseofaction 2y agoWhen the short term cost of non-participation is far, far higher than the long term cost for the individual, is the ToS anything less than coercive? If you don't use github on principle, you're fucked. We need the public square back, we need it conceptualised as such. The death of twitter was horrifying, apparently you can just BUY it. Excuse my passionate language, but fuck these predators.
- ralferoo 2y agoCopyright law is pretty clear that copyright automatically belongs to the creator from the moment they create something. People can choose to transfer those rights to another party, e.g. assigning the copyright to an employer or selling the rights, or by licensing rights to someone else to use the content. But it cannot be assumed that everything is "free" in the absence of a copyright notice, on the contrary one must assume that everything is copyrighted in the absence of a notice saying it's free. The following rules are agreed upon by pretty much every country that has an interest in copyright: https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/summary_berne.html https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/summary_berne.html
- rvnx 2y agoIn practice it's not the case, you can see Google Search or Microsoft Bing, they are reproducing copyrighted content without asking prior permission, and for commercial use. This is called a search engine.
- Mindwipe 2y agoOne of the reasons Google Image Search is so neutered is because it was sued and lost. Small extracts or low quality assets are usually permissible, full on scraping is not.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoTell that to all the StackOverflow clones out there. It's really crazy. If I search for any of the things I have posted on SO, for the last dozen years, I get multiple hits. There are quite a number of sites that just full-on scrape SO, strip out the attributions, then republish, wrapped in their branding. I suspect that this is done for many, many other content-rich sites.
- lupire 2y agoExample?
- ankit219 2y agoCurrent laws are insufficient to address this, but we will end up using them to adjudicate whether or not this is fair use. We will get there in due time, and the pathway will be messy. I am ambivalent about this overall, but few things are clear. Someone getting sued does not automatically mean they are wrong and whoever is suing is right. We don't know the rules, and hence the lawsuit. I see it being used as an evidence of wrongdoing, and seems plainly wrong. Every thing that becomes big ends up being sued (including the artists with allegations that they copied someone's work). Tells us nothing. (I think this part is clear) Reproducing content verbatim without permission, and for profit, is plain old plagiarism, whether it's done via AI or human. In some cases, with proper citations, it is allowed, but otherwise it's a no. For summarized content, with or without credit and citations, was always allowed, but never done at this scale, so this "social contract" might need to change.
- courseofaction 2y agoThis is the leading edge of a conversation about the 'data' we emit moment to moment, digital and otherwise, and the right of powerful players to incorporate that into models which will definitely be used against us. The social contract has never been sacrosanct, it's enforced through social consequences. These companies don't feel social consequences, individuals making these psychopathic decisions are socially rewarded by their peers and allies, and financially rewarded in turn. Money is a flow of power, not of value. Especially post Bretton-Woods.
- ankit219 2y agoThat is the contentious part. These are not easy questions. People talk about data, but individual data is as useless as they come for many companies. Data is only useful in aggregate and that too after reaching a certain scale. Counter intuitively, individual data (w or w/o PII) is more likely to be used for nefarious purposes compared to aggregated data. Aggregated data can lead to better user experiences, better utilization of our time, and can deliver more value to us (while delivering personalized ads). No one should create a blanket rule which bans aggregation given how it can ban Google Maps and Google search and Google ads in the same breath if interpreted broadly. With generative AI, the paradigm has changed and it needs a rethink. That was my original point. We don't have a clear answer yet.
- rspoerri 2y agoSoooo... Any downloadable version of Office and Windows are Freeware for my AI to train and spill out the same code again? Kinda cool i think. /s
- croes 2y agoTranslation: If it benefits us it's free, if not you get sued.
- exe34 2y agoSo I can train a model on all available Windows material, including from MS themselves, and sell it as a support bot?
- dindobre 2y agoYes
- rty32 2y agoProbably more useful than all those posts in Microsoft Community. Make sure to exclude an post with "MVP" in there.
- poikroequ 2y agoSomeone should do this, scrape everything Microsoft (don't forget MSN news), then create an online chat bot trained on all their data. Tout it all over the web. Then sit back and watch how quickly Microsoft moves to get it taken down. Sheer hypocrisy.
- yencabulator 2y agoFrom the article: > "There's a separate category where a website or publisher or news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me,' so that other people can find that content," he explained. "But that's the gray area. And I think that's going to work its way through the courts." Microsoft wants rules for thee, not for me.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoI don't think you'd be breaking the law doing that. As long as you don't reproduce any of the MS-owned material in your output. Data isn't protected by copyright (in the US at least), so your AI could extract the knowledge from some text and present it in its own different way.
- exe34 2y agothat won't stop them suing you into oblivion. they can afford the lawyers. you waste a decade of your life.
- dspillett 2y agoHow about we test this theory by copying all the “freeware” content that MS put out. Heck, as it is freeware and not anything more restrictive, we can make derivative works too!
- denton-scratch 2y agoYou missed the point: what Suleyman was saying is that content is freeware, provided the publisher doesn't have a well-staffed legal department. Microsoft does have that, so what they publish isn't freeware. This is an attitude that has run in Microsoft's veins since the start; they've always been scofflaws, they've always been in the business of stealing other people's inventions. For Microsoft, laws are for protecting their moat. Frankly, I'm astonished that Suleyman said this on the record.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danybittel 2y ago"I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 1990s has been it is fair use" And that social contract did not include AI. You put content on the internet because you had certain expectations on how it'll be seen or used.
- chrishare 2y agoRight. Training models is qualitatively different to educating or entertaining users.
- lupire 2y agoHow so? The models are educating and entertaining. Those things aren't what makes a copy fair use, though.
- chrishare 2y agoBecause models do so in competition with humans, in a way that threatens their way of life. Atleast until the rewards and benefits of ML are shared fairly, people don't to help accelerate that.
- MiguelX413 2y agoDo people not do it in competition with each other too?
- chrishare 2y agoThey do, on a equal footing. Even human level AI will blow human professionals out of the water, let alone superhuman.
- wwweston 2y agoAnd the idea that fair use includes training set fodder is a non-starter. This use was not only unaddressed in fair use standards were created it involves a set of capabilities that was inconceivable at the time, so it can’t have been intended — even the most generous reading of “transformative” can’t allow for automated reproduction however fractal in nature.
- CM30 2y agoI'm sure all those media outlets and rights organisations are going to love this logic, and it's not going to backfire at all. They're already being sued by multiple news organisations, the author's guild of America, a few celebrities and likely many other organisations in the coming few months, and I'm sure at least some of the lawyers of those people are going to end up using this quote in court.
- lambdaone 2y agoFascinating watching Microsoft morphing from intellectual property absolutism to this. "What's mine is mine, what's yours is also mine."
- ozim 2y agoYeah if I don’t lock my house and someone takes all the furniture it is not a theft…… What a joke of a person. I hope court will roll over them harshly and explain world doesn’t work like that and just because you can do something it doesn’t make it right.
- keiferski 2y agoI think there's a 99% certainty that almost all serious media websites in the future are paywalled, especially ones that provide information useful to businesses. There is less and less benefit to making your work public.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoI think people are getting confused between using something and redistributing it. If you train an AI or build a search engine index, or your browser caches a webpage, you're just using it, and it was put on the web so that it can be used, without any restrictions on what for (except perhaps when the permission to even download it is granted conditionally on how you use it as Suleyman mentioned). Copyright restricts copying, not private use. Since it's on the web, there really is an implied permission to use it privately for whatever you want. The copyright issue only comes up if you publish the output of your model. But if the AI is (somehow) clever enough to never reproduce the source material in any way that counts as copying for the purposes of copyright, then there's no copyright problem making it available to the public. Some artists assume they have more rights than they really do and that other people aren't even allowed to mimic their style.
- yencabulator 2y ago> and it was put on the web so that it can be used, without any restrictions on what for Nope, copyright applies just like it always does.
- keiferski 2y agoYour comment is a traditional understanding of copyright, pre-AI tools. The point is that this old model increasingly seems inadequate when a megacorporation can functionally copy and reproduce your work to an extremely close, but not exact, degree and then claim they did nothing wrong.
- EnigmaFlare 2y agoExtremely close but not exact copying is already not allowed. Human artists have tried that. Just because AI threatens to produce equally valuable material for much lower cost doesn't mean that's wrong. It just means those people got out-competed in the market. That's what the free market is for - to serve the consumers, not the producers.
- keiferski 2y ago
- operae 2y ago"I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 1990s has been it is fair use" This argument cannot possibly hold in any court. This has not been the 'contract'. I cannot reproduce the content of a newspapers online outlet, I cannot reproduce the art of another artist on Instagram, I cannot reproduce someones Youtube video without permission. This same thing sparked the whole fair-use debate some years ago. The exceptions to these rules have always existed in limbos of regulatory grey areas and are being discussed for decades now. This guy is still living in the Napster-era apparently and the amount of gaslighting Microsoft, OpenAI, Google etc. perform right now to freeload on data is presumptuous.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 127 2y ago"If you don't have enough money to sue us, your copyright doesn't exist."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kye 2y agoI guess I own and can do whatever I want with this Windows ISO then. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- piva00 2y agoIt is the kind of attitude that will bring regulations; in the USA it will probably take a decade (as it usually does) for legislators catch up to it after some company skirting copyright laws has became big enough to be another economical powerhouse for the US's economy. The EU is probably already acting on it behind closed doors, the usual vitriol against "innovation" peddled by the American-way of doing business went pretty high against the AI Act (which is definitely far from perfect but a step into some direction to regulate it), in the near future I can see more rulings or even new regulation to address the absurdity of AI companies consuming all this data for their own profits with no compensation to the creators of it. My personal opinion is that leaving "innovation" be the only guidance to what is "good" without any morality imbued is stupid. A lot of us has seen the cycle by now, what was innovative before becomes entrenched, the entrenched companies become behemoths, and obviously start abusing their position of power when consumers have very little options to not be in the system they created. The downfall of tech from what I experienced in the early 2000s to what it has come to be in the 2020s is just sad, it's the new 80s finance yuppie bullshit, instead of coke-addicted greedy as fuck bros we have nerdy-blabbing-about-changing-the-world greedy fucks reaping the profits. This will get ugly, and companies doing it will deserve the retribution if they get fucked.
- bmacho 2y agoWhat about windows source code? Is that free real estate too?
- dvhh 2y agoI understand that the robots.txt is mostly taken as guidelines for courtesy. But if a large corporation can not be expected to respect it, there might be more proactive measures applied as countermeasures.
- courseofaction 2y agoSee this in the context of corporate and governmental greed aligning into the impoverishment of the masses. This is part of a general movement towards wealth concentration, and war is the next step.
- dialup_sounds 2y ago"information wants to be free" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free?w...
- courseofaction 2y agoThere are no rules. This is an everyone be damned land grab with every imperialistic instinct justifying itself with bullshit. Read a history book.
- jerpint 2y agoI have my own small blog , and am more and more tempted to “poison” it with made up facts about me to see if/when it gets scraped by LLMs
- bithead 2y agoNo wonder AI gets so much shit wrong. Asked ChatGPG a pydantic V2 question yesterday and it got it so wrong it would have hurt to watch if it were a person teaching a class. I hope AI doesn't start running operations and building planes...
- surfingdino 2y agoToo late, people are already using AI to embellish CVs and hirings managers are using AI to screen applications and CVs... with that level of stupidity I expect stuff to start falling out of the skies soon.
- surfingdino 2y agoOh, do fuck off. Copyright exists so that copyright owners have control over who uses their content and for what. Search brings visitors so that kind of use is beneficial to both parties. Training models that repurpose and recombine other copyright owners' IP and assigning copyright to the patchwork created using LLMs is not beneficial to the original copyright owner and is pure theft. Has Microsoft looked at what Adobe did a couple of weeks ago and thought "we haven't had shit thrown at us for a while, we'll have some of that, please?"
- itronitron 2y agoSeems like it would be easy to structure 'online content' so that it poisons the model with either nonsensical content or offensive content, like what happened with 'santorum'.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40826588