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Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content fo
by lioeters 2y ago
Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling.
It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful misdeeds.
By the time some of them get huge, they're in bed with the government to dominate the market.
- FragrantRiver 2y agoWhat is the crime?
- brayhite 2y agoA tale as told as time.
- johnwheeler 2y agoTo me this is a no brainer. If it’s a choice between having AI and not,
- ceejayoz 2y agoEven if the knock-on effect is "all the artists and thinkers who contributed to the uncompensated free training set give up and stop creating new stuff"?
- brvsft 2y agoIf an "artist" or "thinker" stops because of this, I question their motivations and those labels in the first place.
- bayindirh 2y agoAfter Instagram started feeding user photos to their AI models, I stopped adding new photos to my profile. I still take photos. I wonder about your thoughts about my motivation.
- brvsft 2y ago[flagged]
- esafak 2y agoThey might be motivated to pay their bills. Weird people.
- brvsft 2y agoRight, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people. Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.
- esafak 2y agoNumerous kinds of artists are feeling the squeeze. Copy writers, stock photographers, graphic designers, UI designers, interior designers, etc.
- PlattypusRex 2y agoI guess it's their fault for not being clairvoyant before AI arrived, and for sharing their portfolio with others online to advertise their skills for commissions to pay for food and rent.
- ceejayoz 2y agoEveryone tends to have "be able to afford basic necessities" as a major motivation. That includes people who work in creative fields.
- Drakim 2y agoSeveral of the agricultural revolutions we went though is what freed up humanity to not spend all of it's work producing sustenance, leaving time for other professions like making art and music. But it also destroyed a lot of jobs for people who were necessary for gathering food the old inefficient way. If we take your argument to it's logical conclusion, all progress is inherently bad, and should be stopped. I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.
- LunaSea 2y ago> I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine. Yes, because if you depend on some overarching organisation or person to give it to you, you are fucked 100% of the time due this dependency.
- PlattypusRex 2y agoThe net result was positive in that new jobs were created for every farming job lost, as people moved to cities. If AI replaces millions of jobs, it will be a net negative in job availability for working class people. I agree with your last point, the way the system is set up is incompatible with the looming future.
- Drakim 2y agoThe jobs in the cities weren't created by the new farming techniques though, those new farming techniques only removed jobs by the millions like you are saying AI might do.
- consteval 2y agoConsidering you're not much of an artist or thinker yourself, I'm not sure your questioning has much value.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- idunnoman1222 2y agoRecording devices, you know a record player had a profound effect on artists. go back
- ceejayoz 2y agoThat seems like a poor comparison. Recording devices permitted artists to sell more art. Many of the uses of AI people get most excited about seem to be cutting the expensive human creators out of the equation.
- golergka 2y agoRecording devices destroyed most of the musician's jobs. Vast majority of musicians who were employed before advent of recordings didn't have their own material and were not good enough to make good recordings anyway. Same with artists now: the great ones will be much more productive, but the bottom 80-90% won't have anything to do anymore.
- dale_glass 2y agoI disagree, with AI the dynamics are very different from recording. Current AI can greatly elevate what a beginning artist can produce. If you have a decent grasp of proportions, perspective and good ideas, but aren't great at drawing, then using AI can be a huge quality improvement. On the other hand if you're a top expert that draws quickly and efficiently it's quite possible that AI can't do very much for you in a lot of cases, at least not without a lot of hand tuning like training it on your own work first.
- golergka 2y agoI think it will just emphasise different skills and empower creative fields which use art but are not art per se. If you're a movie director, you can storyboard your ideas easily, and even get some animation clips. If you're an artist with a distinct personal style, you're in a much better position too. And if you're a beginner who is just starting, you can focus on learning these skills instead of technical proficiency.
- brazzy 2y agoIndeed a no brainer. The best possible outcome would be that OpenAI gets sued into oblivion (or shut down for tax fraud) as soon as possible.
- Sakos 2y agoSo no AI for anybody? I don't see how that's better.
- consteval 2y agoNo you can have AI. Just pay a license for people's content if you want to use it in your orphan crushing machine. It's what everyone else does. The entitlement has to stop.
- Sakos 2y agoThat's just not feasible and you know it. That just means companies like Google and OpenAI (with billions of dollars from companies like MS and Apple) will monopolize AI. This isn't better for everybody else. It just means we're subject to the whims of these companies. You're advocating for destroying all AI or ensuring a monopoly by corporations. Whose side are you actually on?
- consteval 2y ago> That's just not feasible and you know it Irrelevant. The law does not care about feasibility of breaking it. If I decide to run a hit man business, that's also infeasible. Dealing with the arrests and fines would be too much. The conclusion then is not to bend the law to make murder legal. The conclusion is my business is illegitimate, and it's the civic duty of my Country to make sure it fails. > Whose side are you actually on? The people making the content that corps are profiting big off of. They should pay a license.
- evilfred 2y agowe already have lots of AI. this is about having plagiarization machines or not.
- johnwheeler 2y agoYeah we got that AI through scraping.
- mlazos 2y agoComputers already were plagiarizing machines, not sure what the difference is tbh. The same laws will apply.0
- int_19h 2y agoAn AI essentially monopolized by one (or even a few) large non-profits is not necessarily beneficial to the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.
- mdgrech23 2y agoThe people running the show are well connected and stand to make billions as do would be investors. Give a few key players a share in the company and they forget their government jobs to regulate.
- barbazoo 2y agoMore likely the legal system just hasn’t caught up.
- llm_trw 2y agoMaybe, but for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it.
- dingnuts 2y agogod forbid that actually be happening in a way to improve the commons
- vezycash 2y ago> for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it Nope. The law will side with whoever pays the most. Once OpenAI solidifies its top position, only then will regulations kick in. Take YouTube, for example—it grew thanks to piracy. Now, as the leader, ContentID and DMCA rules work in its favor, blocking competition. If TikTok wasn’t a copyright-ignoring Chinese company, it would’ve been dead on arrival.
- Sakos 2y agoWe're already seeing it in things like Google buying rights to Reddit data for training. It's already happening. Only companies who can afford to pay will be building AI, so Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
- archagon 2y agoThe big companies will sign lucrative data sharing deals with each other and build a collective moat, while open source models will be left to rot. Copyright for thee but not for me.
- immibis 2y agoEverything is allowed to happen until there's a lawsuit over it. A lawsuit requires a plaintiff, who can only sue over the damage suffered by the plaintiff, so taking a little value from a lot of people is a way to succeed in business without getting sued.
- swores 2y agoCould a class action suit be the solution? I've no idea if it could be valid when it comes to OpenAI, but it does seem to be a general concept designed to counter wrongdoers who take a little value from a lot of people?
- immibis 2y agoIt doesn't seem to work very well
- flkenosad 2y agoThe Earth needs a good lawyer.
- outside1234 2y agoNY Times has sued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... The crazy thing is that there hasn't been an injunction to make them stop.
- coding123 2y agojudges got to eat
- outside1234 2y agoThere is more money on the side of it being legal than on the side of it being illegal.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoIt's too soon for the legal system to have done anything. Court cases take years. It's going to be 5 or 10 years before we find out whether the legal system actually allows this or not.
- marviel 2y agoscraping is fine by me. burning the bridge so nobody else can legally scrape, that's the line.
- Vegenoid 2y agoWhat about the situation where the first players got to scrape, then all the content companies realize what’s going on so they lock their data up behind paywalls?
- avs733 2y agoUber for legalizing your business model
- golergka 2y agoIf information is publicly available to be read by humans, I fail to see any reason why it wouldn't be also available to be read by robots. Update: ML doesn't copy information. It can merely memorise some small portions of it.
- kanbankaren 2y agoDo a thought process. Should you and your friends be able to go to a public library with a van full of copiers with each one of you take a book and run to the van to make a copy? And you are doing it 24/7.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoSo what's your specific problem with that? Unless you open a bookstore selling the copies, it sounds fine.
- imiric 2y agoAre you implying that these AI companies aren't equivalent to bookstores?
- golergka 2y agoYes, they are not bookstores. They manufacture artificial erudites who have read all these books.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoFor it to be a bookstore, it would have to provide complete copies of the books, which it doesn't do at all.
- shagie 2y agoI would hold them exactly to the same standard. https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html § 201.14 Warnings of copyright for use by certain libraries and archives. .... The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement. It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
- neycoda 2y agoHonestly every Copilot response I've gotten cited sources, many of which I've clicked. I'd say those work basically like free advertising.
- coding123 2y agoIt is more likely that reddit stack and others are just being paid billions. In exchange they probably just send a weekly zip file of all text, comments, etc... back to oai.
- jstummbillig 2y agoIt's not baffling at all. It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species. The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me. The path trotten is what got us here and obviously nobody could have paid people upfront for the wild experimentation that was necessary. The only alternative is not having done it. Given the path it has put as in, people either are insanely cruel or just completely detached from reality when it comes to what is necessary to do entirely new things.
- thomascgalvin 2y ago> It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species. "Hugely beneficial" is a stretch at this point. It has the potential to be hugely beneficial, sure, but it also has the potential to be ruinous. We're already seeing GenAI being used to create disinformation at scale. That alone makes the potential for this being a net-negative very high.
- anon7725 2y ago> it's hugely beneficial to our species. Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.
- Terr_ 2y agoI can easily imagine people X decades from now discussing this stuff a bit like how we now view teeth-whitening radium toothpaste and putting asbestos in everything, or perhaps more like the abuse of Social Security numbers as authentication and redlining. Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed." P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
- 5040 2y ago
- eli 2y agoCopyright law is whatever we agree it is. At some point there will have to be either a law or a court case that comes up with rules for AI training data. Right now it's sort of unknown. I do not have confidence in the Supreme Court in general, and I think there's a real risk that in deciding on AI training they upend copyright of digital materials in a way that makes it worse for everyone.
- RIMR 2y ago>How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling. It's completely unprecedented. We allowed scraping images and text en masse when search engines used the data to let us find stuff. We allow copying of style, and don't allow writing styles and aesthetics to be copyrighted or trademarked. Then AI shows up, and people change lanes because they don't like the results. One of the things that made me tilt towards the side of fair use was a breakdown of the Stable Diffusion model. The SD2.1 base model was trained on 5.85 billion images, all normalized to 512x512 BMP. That's 1MB per images, for a total of 5.85PB of BMP files. The resulting model is only 5.2GB. That's more than 99.999999% data loss from the source data to the trained set. For every 1MB BMP file in the training dataset, less than 1byte makes it into the model. I find it extremely difficult to call this redistribution of copyrighted data. It falls cleanly into fair use.
- ang_cire 2y agoExcept it's not just about redistribution of copyrighted data, it's about usage and obtainment. We don't get to obtain and use copyrighted content without permission, but they do? Hell no. Their arguments against this amounts to "we're not using it like they intend it to be used, so it's fine if we obtain it illegally", and that's a bs standard, totally divorced from any legal reality. Fair Use covers certain transformative uses, certainly, but it doesn't cover illegal obtaining of the content. You can't pirate a book just because you want to use it transformatively (which is exactly what they've done), and that argument would never hold up for us as individuals, so we sure as hell shouldn't let tech companies get a special carve-out for it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]