5 ms·

> We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web That is such a weird and misleading way to put it. There was no consent in the first place

by janice1999 2y ago

> We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web That is such a weird and misleading way to put it. There was no consent in the first place. Take YouTube for example. Google did not consent to the videos it hosts being used by OpenAI. The uploader certainly did not ever consent to their face, voice and content being used to train models either.

advael 2y ago
I think this is an important thing to point out. This is the first really compelling test of the legal theory that the overbroad content-ownership boilerplate licenses big user-generated-content hosts use could actually bind people to allow arbitrary use of their content, likeness, etc. Before the uses of it were actually quite egregious, but kind of abstract, things like "build a profile on you to advertise products" has incredibly deep and creepy implications but they're for whatever reason not as unifying an objection as this
- squigz 2y ago
  I doubt that this theory has not been put to the test, repeatedly.
  - advael 2y ago
    Guess we just take legal matters on faith then? My lawyer's gonna be devastated
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Right, I think a better way to put it is that there was complacency and neutrality (inattention) on the topic before. But now that people see that their work is going to be used to flood the culture with slop, the new default stance is to deny consent.
linkjuice4all 2y ago
I agree that these content creators were not contacted individually and asked for specific consent to have their materials ingested for training purposes. That being said - the general crux of the third-party doctrine (at least in the United States) is that information told to another party has no expectation of privacy. That seems to apply to a vast amount of 'user generated content' on the internet. Someone decided to utilize someone else's megaphone to post into the commons and now expects to retain some ownership. It's hard to have it both ways "just because someone else noticed." Unfortunately this also extends to general artistic styles. If you, as an artist, continues to create in a consistent style and someone else notices you don't have a lot of recourse when some entity is able to recreate a similar style. On a technical side this seems similar to your server responding to any incoming request with a 200 status and some content (LinkedIn v HiQ). In this case a user-agent asked (was it a person? scraper? AI training process?) and you gave it to "them". I guess we end up in the position where if you don't want to train AI then don't post your content publicly.
- jprete 2y ago
  Intellectual property and privacy aren't the same thing, so the third-party doctrine doesn't apply.
- chuckadams 2y ago
  > information told to another party has no expectation of privacy. I truly detest this phrase, but: “Citation Needed”
  - linkjuice4all 2y ago
    If Alice tells Bob something there's nothing preventing Bob from telling Carol. The third-party doctrine kind of boils down to this - someone else noticed and you can't restrain them from telling anyone about it. Alice (content creator) told Bob (YouTube). Bob told Carol (OpenAI et al.) when Carol asked Bob for a video.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
buildbot 2y ago
You did when you uploaded it and consented to the ToS. Google was training on all of YouTube back in 2012 - https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/google-computers-learn-to-identify-cats-on-youtube-in-artificial-intelligence-study.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/google-computers-learn-...
- janice1999 2y ago
  The article is about third parties, e.g. OpenAI scraping Youtube and Reddit.
  - buildbot 2y ago
    Responding to this GP point: > The uploader certainly did not ever consent to their face, voice and content being used to train models either. I'm also not saying I _support_ ToS
    - godelski 2y ago
      I'd argue that there was no consent here in the first place. I want to remind everyone, there are plenty of times and reasons a contract can be invalidated. Consent requires the person knowing what they are consenting to. How many people do you think know that posting your face on Facebook consents to using your face to generate photos? Your voice to create voice generators? What about when someone posts a group photo or video and despite you not having an account that the same rules apply? What about all the photos created by others and uploaded by those with no ownership or rights to the photos in the first place? They can't legally give away the rights. Then we also have to consider that the environment has changed and the terms changed under people. You may have signed up for Facebook and knew they were going to use your data to sell ads and do some analysis. But you didn't know AI was coming (let's be real, no one knew even at the time of AlexNet. It didn't become clear in tech groups until maybe 2016/2017). Sure, the agreements might "be the same" but people always contextualize things. In 2012 you might not care that Facebook "owns" your voice because you know they have to host the file, and contextually it is "just over legalize". But in 2024, now the context is that this trains a model that can replicate your voice and this means something VERY different. I think there's this common attitude of "Oh, well you agreed to the terms" as if this makes the terms fair, reasonable, or okay in the first place. It doesn't account for the reality of the situation. It just further legitimizes this world where a person is legally culpable for not having domain expertise. News flash, we live in a specialized world and you can't be a domain expert in everything. It doesn't account for the fact that there is often no alternative and there is serious cohesion at this point. Unfortunately, not all the choices in your life are up to you and many are social (and many of those are idiotic and can force you into decisions nearly no one in the group wants[0]) and not all the choices you make ultimately come down to you. If it was up to me everyone would be using Signal to communicate with me and no one would have bought Apple products when they made their devices unupgradable and charged more for _increasing_ your disk space than it would cost to buy 1.5 drives in the first place. But also, thank god that everything isn't up to me because I'm also a fucking idiot. No, I don't think there was consent this whole time and as time progressed we amount and capacity you have had to consent to has decreased. And dismissing it (the fact that consent is not binary) just makes the problem exponentially worse. Not to mention all the dark patterns which I can do a whole other rant about. [0] Prime example: the American presidential race. The vast majority of people would rather have neither Trump nor Biden running. The vast majority of people do not want a gerontocracy but will vote for one of the two candidates because what other choice do they have? People __could__ agree to to vote for a third party, but doing so gives such a strategic disadvantage that people are rational in attempting to choose from the options provided to them (see primaries).
ADeerAppeared 2y ago
I disagree, consent is important here, and the "move fast and break things" mentality is what's causing problems. #1 It's not all that certain AI training is fair use. There could be significant damages if it is found to not be fair use. #2 "We're going to steal your shit even if you won't give us consent to do that" is a bad idea. We're already seeing the practical results: People stop/reduce posting their works to the clearnet. What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued? Pay a subscription fee to every single Patreon page? And the big one, #3: It destroys public support for your technology, which is essential if you want to survive the oncoming government regulation. Look at the public response to various tech companies stopping their AI rollout in europe over EU regulations. Varying from "Yes, this is exactly what we asked for" to "Good fucking riddance". And it will get only worse yet. Europe's privacy authorities are already issuing quiet statements that the scraping of social media posts, such as is done for AI data collection, is not legal under the GDPR. (The law's pretty clear on this, it doesn't matter that it was "posted publicly", you're not allowed to use personal data like that) There's already whispers of going after the LLMs themselves, as they contain and continue to process personal data as well. AI needs public support, and the lack of consent is slowly bleeding it dry.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued? More likely, that the owners of any repository of note will simply broker that data directly (a la Reddit).
  - ADeerAppeared 2y ago
    Yes, though this scenario isn't all that interesting to discuss: * In the case of big IP holders (e.g. media companies, news organizations) this is just obtaining consent. The only fun quirck is that OpenAI's purchasing of this drastically lowers the "AI training is fair use" claim by proving the existance of a market. * In the case of platforms like Reddit, it just kicks the problem one layer down. The platform does obtain "consent" through it's ToS. (Beware that this consent is legally weak, and won't protect your ass from anything outside copyright) But users will still see it as "stealing" and may flee the platform. There's still a notable shift away from the clearnet.
Normal_gaussian 2y ago
As a note; historically the typical real-world opt-in rates I have seen for EU apps that are trusted names, and self-evidently include content that would benefit from personalisation (names, key dates, location) is about 30%. less trusted falls to about 20%. Untrustworthy apps tend to go higher, as high as 60+% - I assume that is because of either deceptive patterns or the types of user they have.

advael 2y ago

I think this is an important thing to point out. This is the first really compelling test of the legal theory that the overbroad content-ownership boilerplate licenses big user-generated-content hosts use could actually bind people to allow arbitrary use of their content, likeness, etc. Before the uses of it were actually quite egregious, but kind of abstract, things like "build a profile on you to advertise products" has incredibly deep and creepy implications but they're for whatever reason not as unifying an objection as this

squigz 2y ago
I doubt that this theory has not been put to the test, repeatedly.
- advael 2y ago
  Guess we just take legal matters on faith then? My lawyer's gonna be devastated

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

Right, I think a better way to put it is that there was complacency and neutrality (inattention) on the topic before. But now that people see that their work is going to be used to flood the culture with slop, the new default stance is to deny consent.

linkjuice4all 2y ago

I agree that these content creators were not contacted individually and asked for specific consent to have their materials ingested for training purposes. That being said - the general crux of the third-party doctrine (at least in the United States) is that information told to another party has no expectation of privacy. That seems to apply to a vast amount of 'user generated content' on the internet. Someone decided to utilize someone else's megaphone to post into the commons and now expects to retain some ownership. It's hard to have it both ways "just because someone else noticed." Unfortunately this also extends to general artistic styles. If you, as an artist, continues to create in a consistent style and someone else notices you don't have a lot of recourse when some entity is able to recreate a similar style. On a technical side this seems similar to your server responding to any incoming request with a 200 status and some content (LinkedIn v HiQ). In this case a user-agent asked (was it a person? scraper? AI training process?) and you gave it to "them". I guess we end up in the position where if you don't want to train AI then don't post your content publicly.

jprete 2y ago
Intellectual property and privacy aren't the same thing, so the third-party doctrine doesn't apply.
chuckadams 2y ago
> information told to another party has no expectation of privacy. I truly detest this phrase, but: “Citation Needed”
- linkjuice4all 2y ago
  If Alice tells Bob something there's nothing preventing Bob from telling Carol. The third-party doctrine kind of boils down to this - someone else noticed and you can't restrain them from telling anyone about it. Alice (content creator) told Bob (YouTube). Bob told Carol (OpenAI et al.) when Carol asked Bob for a video.
  - JohnFen 2y ago

buildbot 2y ago

You did when you uploaded it and consented to the ToS. Google was training on all of YouTube back in 2012 - https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/google-computers-learn-to-identify-cats-on-youtube-in-artificial-intelligence-study.html https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/google-computers-learn-...

janice1999 2y ago
The article is about third parties, e.g. OpenAI scraping Youtube and Reddit.
- buildbot 2y ago
  Responding to this GP point: > The uploader certainly did not ever consent to their face, voice and content being used to train models either. I'm also not saying I _support_ ToS
  - godelski 2y ago
    I'd argue that there was no consent here in the first place. I want to remind everyone, there are plenty of times and reasons a contract can be invalidated. Consent requires the person knowing what they are consenting to. How many people do you think know that posting your face on Facebook consents to using your face to generate photos? Your voice to create voice generators? What about when someone posts a group photo or video and despite you not having an account that the same rules apply? What about all the photos created by others and uploaded by those with no ownership or rights to the photos in the first place? They can't legally give away the rights. Then we also have to consider that the environment has changed and the terms changed under people. You may have signed up for Facebook and knew they were going to use your data to sell ads and do some analysis. But you didn't know AI was coming (let's be real, no one knew even at the time of AlexNet. It didn't become clear in tech groups until maybe 2016/2017). Sure, the agreements might "be the same" but people always contextualize things. In 2012 you might not care that Facebook "owns" your voice because you know they have to host the file, and contextually it is "just over legalize". But in 2024, now the context is that this trains a model that can replicate your voice and this means something VERY different. I think there's this common attitude of "Oh, well you agreed to the terms" as if this makes the terms fair, reasonable, or okay in the first place. It doesn't account for the reality of the situation. It just further legitimizes this world where a person is legally culpable for not having domain expertise. News flash, we live in a specialized world and you can't be a domain expert in everything. It doesn't account for the fact that there is often no alternative and there is serious cohesion at this point. Unfortunately, not all the choices in your life are up to you and many are social (and many of those are idiotic and can force you into decisions nearly no one in the group wants[0]) and not all the choices you make ultimately come down to you. If it was up to me everyone would be using Signal to communicate with me and no one would have bought Apple products when they made their devices unupgradable and charged more for _increasing_ your disk space than it would cost to buy 1.5 drives in the first place. But also, thank god that everything isn't up to me because I'm also a fucking idiot. No, I don't think there was consent this whole time and as time progressed we amount and capacity you have had to consent to has decreased. And dismissing it (the fact that consent is not binary) just makes the problem exponentially worse. Not to mention all the dark patterns which I can do a whole other rant about. [0] Prime example: the American presidential race. The vast majority of people would rather have neither Trump nor Biden running. The vast majority of people do not want a gerontocracy but will vote for one of the two candidates because what other choice do they have? People __could__ agree to to vote for a third party, but doing so gives such a strategic disadvantage that people are rational in attempting to choose from the options provided to them (see primaries).

ADeerAppeared 2y ago

I disagree, consent is important here, and the "move fast and break things" mentality is what's causing problems. #1 It's not all that certain AI training is fair use. There could be significant damages if it is found to not be fair use. #2 "We're going to steal your shit even if you won't give us consent to do that" is a bad idea. We're already seeing the practical results: People stop/reduce posting their works to the clearnet. What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued? Pay a subscription fee to every single Patreon page? And the big one, #3: It destroys public support for your technology, which is essential if you want to survive the oncoming government regulation. Look at the public response to various tech companies stopping their AI rollout in europe over EU regulations. Varying from "Yes, this is exactly what we asked for" to "Good fucking riddance". And it will get only worse yet. Europe's privacy authorities are already issuing quiet statements that the scraping of social media posts, such as is done for AI data collection, is not legal under the GDPR. (The law's pretty clear on this, it doesn't matter that it was "posted publicly", you're not allowed to use personal data like that) There's already whispers of going after the LLMs themselves, as they contain and continue to process personal data as well. AI needs public support, and the lack of consent is slowly bleeding it dry.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
> What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued? More likely, that the owners of any repository of note will simply broker that data directly (a la Reddit).
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  Yes, though this scenario isn't all that interesting to discuss: * In the case of big IP holders (e.g. media companies, news organizations) this is just obtaining consent. The only fun quirck is that OpenAI's purchasing of this drastically lowers the "AI training is fair use" claim by proving the existance of a market. * In the case of platforms like Reddit, it just kicks the problem one layer down. The platform does obtain "consent" through it's ToS. (Beware that this consent is legally weak, and won't protect your ass from anything outside copyright) But users will still see it as "stealing" and may flee the platform. There's still a notable shift away from the clearnet.

Normal_gaussian 2y ago

As a note; historically the typical real-world opt-in rates I have seen for EU apps that are trusted names, and self-evidently include content that would benefit from personalisation (names, key dates, location) is about 30%. less trusted falls to about 20%. Untrustworthy apps tend to go higher, as high as 60+% - I assume that is because of either deceptive patterns or the types of user they have.