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It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI
- talldayo 2y ago> But in plain terms, it doesn’t seem defensible for a major company with tons of lawyers, money, and talent to knowingly use stolen work to build something that they then turn around and sell. cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
- antigeox 2y ago[dead]
- zdw 2y agoThis site seems to have some javascript that prevents text selection, even with plugins like StopTheMadness that should allow text selection everywhere. (Not trying to select + copy, just trying to indicate how far I am through the document)
- glitchc 2y agoThey're trying to protect against AI crawlers siphoning their content. Unsurprising given the article's positioning. Isn't it just a matter of time before we see content creators weaponize their sites? They may present text as images or require a user to solve a pictogram cipher etc.
- jsheard 2y agoI don't see how messing with text selection does anything to ward off scrapers. The article content isn't obscured in the HTML in any way.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI would wager that because the AI bots want to scrape all the data possible, then eventually someone will realise that they can setup a site that once scraped will poison the training data in subtle ways. Effectively turning the web scraper into an attack vector. The CSV score would be weird for that.
- spencerflem 2y agoThis exists already and is called SEO
- batch12 2y ago> The CSV score would be weird for that. Did you mean CVSS?
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoYes, I meant CVSS, just had a hallucination. I think I ate to many Christmas food....or maby it was the chocolate bars and Hersey kisses I consumed.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThe only thing needed is a paywall. Scrapers are not going to pay for access.
- jsheard 2y agoThis very thread is about an AI company going out of their way to acquire paywalled content. Maybe they wouldn't bother with this site, but paywalling demonstrably does not help once an AI company sets their sights on you.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThe comment I replied to was referring to scraping data from web sites, which is also an issue that people have with AI training. Feeding pirated torrents to an AI is a different process.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoJust like drm only harming paid users this only harms humans. Ai has no problem making a screenshot and extracting text.
- glitchc 2y agoOne could add adversarial artifacts to the image, making the AI think it's a turtle instead.
- oidar 2y agoVanilla firefox can select text with no extensions.
- archargelod 2y agoSelection (and copying) works on Firefox even with uBlock disabled. With uBlock, though, I have 20+ blocked items. What's the point of having so many scripts that do absolutely nothing visible on the page?
- GaggiX 2y ago> and the simple fact that it is incapable of making anything good. Weird cope about AI, not a very smart one.
- __loam 2y agoNobody is going to read your AI generated book
- GaggiX 2y ago[flagged]
- hedora 2y agoI think that’s a bad bet, not because AI will replace authors, but because many authors will use AI to produce better books at superhuman rates.
- __loam 2y agoI think that's unlikely because: 1) Every author I've seen discuss this technology completely despises it. Using it to write your book is a reputational risk. 2) Putting the words on the paper isn't the hard part. I can imagine many authors wouldn't use this tech even if it was morally and socially okay because they care about whether their voice is getting through in their work.
- b8 2y agoOk? The Google lawsuit and promising lawsuit of the Open library probably will result in a W for Meta. Torrenting is obviously the best way to grab lots of data to train on. Just because they seeded (torrent clients automatically do this) doesn't mean they actually uploaded anything if they couldn't connect to a peer or manually paused/stoped the torrent. Also the author slants the story against Meta and has a bias. At least I felt that way when reading it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tiahura 2y agoAren’t they going to have to prove the FB seed seeded the particular blocks containing the works of the plaintiffs?
- keernan 2y agoI'm not so sure. imo it would be a stretch to suggest Fair Use should disregard how the copyrighted materials were obtained. For example, if Facebook employees broke into the home of a renowned author and stole private copyrighted materials they then used for training their LLMs, should the Court, in analyzing the Fair Use factors, disregard the illegal nature of how the copyrighted materials were obtained? I believe it unlikely a Court would be willing to reward such behavior. Once that principle is resolved, the next step would be for the court to consider whether it would make any difference if Facebook employees did not engage in the direct theft, but acquired copies of the stolen materials from the thief with full knowledge they were stoken. If the court believes both #1 and #2 would be unacceptable, their analysis would then proceed to consider if there were differences favoring Facebook if Facebook acquired millions of copyrighted materials via a notorious website widely accused of illegally posting unauthorized access to copyrighted materials. I suspect this will likely be the central issue of the legal debate. And, I for one, do not think Facebook has a very strong legal argument. Going back to the first step of the anslysis, I would be shocked if SCOTUS would be willing to state that how the copyrighted materials were obtained is irrelevant to the Fair Use analysis.
- rikafurude21 2y agoTraining on datasets like libgen is a "old-school" GPT-3 era method by now - you can just assume any major base models dataset includes a ton of pirated pdfs, really nothing new about this. Information wants to be free, and copying digital data isnt stealing since the information can be replicated infinitely for free. Zuckerberg sucking up to the right wing because the cultural landscape is swinging right is also not surprising.
- fugalfervor 2y ago"I've decided I don't like the law, so AI companies shouldn't have to follow it. And besides, everybody does it." That's the gist of your argument. Take a moment to consider what can be justified by that same reasoning. Just about anything. People work hard on what they write. Many writers struggle to generate a reliable income. Yet to you, it's okay for a competitor to take that work without compensating the author, then use it in a product they will sell. Because "information wants to be free". It breaks my fucking heart how little our society cares about the compensation of artists, authors, and creative people generally; all while gobbling it up and expecting it for free.
- verdverm 2y agoWhen you hear musicians and artists talk about their career, they will talk about their inspirations. They create original works, in part based on their influences, and we do not expect them to pay out to every artist they have encountered. Why is software different? Where should we draw the line between fair use and copyright violation when it comes to AI?
- 23B1 2y ago"Information wants to be free" No, you want it to be free. The people whose labor created that information didn't want it to be free, especially for some gigacorp to launder while hiding behind fair use.
- verdverm 2y agoSome people who create information want it to be free. They often use Creative Commons to ensure it stays free I have a copyright on information I have created, but would never enforce it because I want it to be free and consumed by both humans and AI
- joshe 2y agoI stole a lot of books too, reading them and all. Just integrated them into my worldview, and don't pay a license fee when I use the ideas in new contexts. Sometimes I even quote from them. A lot of them I didn't even pay for, I borrowed them from libraries or friends.
- maeil 2y agoDidn't know Meta paid for them or borrowed them from libraries. In fact, I don't think they did.
- furyofantares 2y agoMaybe not but even if Meta did buy 1 copy of every book I doubt it would stop anyone from making bad analogies to theft. (Not that the analogy on the other side to a human reading is any better.)
- aprilthird2021 2y agoYes because using the books to train a book-replicating machine is a legally grey area.
- nicce 2y agoWhat if we could buy the books for one human, make the human read all the books, and somehow we would be able to clone this human in a way that they remember the book contents. Now, would that be a fair use of the books?
- GuB-42 2y agoThat's what storytelling is, and if you have twins, you even have the "clone" part. Ok, it doesn't tell much about AI and fair use, but I find it funny that your thought experiment is actually something you can do in real life.
- hnfong 2y agoI think we should pay authors a fair wage based on some measure of the quality of the content instead of how well the book sells. There's no reason for Harry Potter for example being 10000 times more valuable than a book on quantum mechanics only because the former is more popular and the latter is on a more obscure topic.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y agoAs a long-time sailor, this case may have no impact on regular folks, but I maintain a fool's hope a Meta victory will significantly weaken the copyright system.
- 23B1 2y agoAs a long-time writer, this case will have impact on me, but I maintain a fool's hope a Meta loss will significantly weaken IP-laundering megacorps.
- Filligree 2y agoAs a long-time writer, this case will have little impact on me, but I maintain a hope it’ll expand the limits of fair use and let us make more shared worlds than we’re allowed to.
- 23B1 2y agoFair use was designed for teachers photocopying pages of Walden for their pupils to read over the weekend. Not industrial-scale laundering of IP to benefit shareholders.
- Filligree 2y agoSo if the latter is fine, then publishing fanfiction should be a small ask, right?
- s1artibartfast 2y agofanfiction can already be published. You just aren't allowed to sell it.
- bloppe 2y agoUnless it's funny enough to qualify as parody.
- nicetryguy 2y agoBringing up Facemash in the second sentence isn't doing anyone any favors, even if i agree with the message of the article, it just blatantly comes off as a hit piece. Comparing zucks college project with the empire of billions of users he eventually amassed is just disingeneous and uncalled for, and it makes me immediately distrust the author.
- namuol 2y agoI think it’s relevant if you consider his personal metamorphosis in the last election cycle relevant.
- __loam 2y agoThere's not a lot of sympathy for this view on this site because half of everyone in tech thinks it's their god given right to pirate content because "copying the information doesn't destroy the information", and because in the past, the people cracking down on piracy were mostly media conglomerates and not the artists themselves. But I'll try to articulate it anyway. The people who created the data all these models trained on, be they artists, writers, or even programmers, created a lot of, if not most of, the value that is now being derived from these models. Instead of being rewarded for their part, a lot of folks here seem very content with casting those people aside and letting huge corporations take everything, while building a system that is trying to make people creating actual things that have value have a much harder time surviving off their trade. It's very gross to me that people are defending Meta here, and seem to be okay with capital eating all forms of cultural expression while giving nothing back.
- Auracle 2y agoNote: I’m not one of those people that think copyright shouldn’t exist. Authors definitely deserve to get paid for their work. That said, my personal belief is that if the books weren’t legally freely available all that Meta owes would be how much the book costs. Each individual book would be such a small part of the model that it’s barely distinguishable. I’m sure image models have been trained on some of my professionally taken photographs and I don’t care one bit. I’d argue that’s the cost of the books was how much it was worth before AI models, and the authors themselves didn’t create the technology. Therefore the added value of the technology has absolutely nothing to do with them. If book publishers/authors decide to have different pricing in the future to take the tech into account that’s their right.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago> That said, my personal belief is that if the books weren’t legally freely available all that Meta owes would be how much the book costs Why isn't stealing and knowing you're stealing penalized more than the cost of the item? If the world worked this way everyone would steal. > Each individual book would be such a small part of the model that it’s barely distinguishable. Needs to be proven (and also impossible to prove how much of the value of the model comes from the classified material)
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago> It’s a grim week for Meta. The company formerly known as Facebook, and before that Facemash, “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students,” Wow if that's the opener, I expect the rest to be SUPER emotionally charged
- dangoodmanUT 2y ago> CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that slurs are okay on their platforms, added a pro-Trump UFC boss to their board The next paragraph...
- koops 2y agoIsn't that in fact true? Emotional or not.
- mrits 2y agoNo, he literally never said or even implied slurs are ok
- mikeyouse 2y agoTheir new moderation training material explicitly said slurs (calling immigrants filth, calling masculine looking females trannies, etc) are ok… https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/ https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...
- mrits 2y agoNo they didn't.
- foogazi 2y agoI thought they were a accepting slurs against trans and immigrants Haven’t tried it yet
- 2y ago
- conradev 2y ago> it doesn’t seem defensible for a major company with tons of lawyers, money, and talent to knowingly use stolen work to build something that they then turn around and sell. I thought they give it away for free?
- yoyohello13 2y agolol, have they been living under a rock? Thats exactly the kind of thing I’d expect a major company to do.
- intuitionist 2y agoTo misquote Don Draper, that’s what the lawyers and money are for!
- jsheard 2y agoNot quite, Llamas license has a carve-out where if you have a lot of users then the open license doesn't apply to you, and you have to talk to Meta to negotiate a different (presumably paid) license. Hyperscaler deployments like AWS Bedrock probably fall into that category. Meta isn't a charity - even if they're not profiting from Llama today, they believe they will at some point.
- sadeshmukh 2y agoThe user exception was for 100m monthly users - if you have that many users, you can afford your own base model. That's hardly a restriction as it is now.
- yonran 2y agoLegally, would it be any worse for Meta to download works that someone illegally copied and repurpose it for a transformative fair use than if Google had taken their scans of snippet-view Google Books borrowed from the library to train their model in fair use?
- aprilthird2021 2y agoI think their intent and knowledge of whether they needed to pay for the content or not is also important. And there's clear evidence they knew they should pay and decided not to
- yonran 2y agoGoogle could take their scans from the library (which they did not pay publishers for) and train an AI model on that, right? They won the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit because snippet view is transformative fair use, and I think teaching an AI model common sense and facts is even more transformative. Should Meta do the same?
- aprilthird2021 2y ago> They won the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit because snippet view is transformative fair use, and I think teaching an AI model common sense and facts is even more transformative. What you think isn't law, it will be decided now. > Should Meta do the same? Well, they didn't do that. They stole the books and knew they were stealing them.
- nejsjsjsbsb 2y agoMy AI does one round of training, and uses the input data as the token generation. You probably have it installed. It is called cp. It is a bit scrappy and not SOTA but hey I am not as big as the fangs. If I train cp on movies released this year and then release each model open source, is this now legal?
- imgabe 2y agoStole them from where? An Amazon warehouse? The New York Public Library? People's homes? Is there any plan to recover the books and return them to their owners?
- irjustin 2y agoStole in that they didn't pay publishers (authors?) any money to use the books. Maybe the Library system does apply here though, that all AI trainers need to buy 1 copy of their book so "their child" can "learn"?
- arthurcolle 2y agoPDF accessible on the world wide web is fair game
- mulmen 2y agoWhile it does appear that Facebook used pirated books for training in this case I’m not sure what to think about copyright as it applies to AI in general. People read books to learn and then use that knowledge with no contribution or even recognition of the publishers or authors of the books. Sometimes people even quote books without payment to the authors. Sometimes the books are used or borrowed and the publishers and authors don’t get paid. How is it different when an AI does the same thing? Or when a human uses an AI to do the same thing? Even if Facebook is in the wrong here what is the remedy? Would it be ok if they purchased used books and scanned them?
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42673628
- WiSaGaN 2y agoThe current copyright system is clearly broken. Copyright itself is not a natural right but a construct that was created relatively recently to incentivize innovation within society. Currently, we still want to train models using copyrighted materials. What we don’t want, however, is for companies to use these materials without giving back, especially to the content creators themselves, such as book authors, publishers, Stack Overflow answer writers, and Stack Overflow as a platform. We need to find a way to properly compensate these contributors to keep book writing, answer writing, and other creative efforts going, preferably while keeping the content publicly accessible. In the future, I hope we can figure out a model that might draw inspiration from music streaming (though perhaps not exactly like it).
- ldehaan 2y ago[dead]
- unraveller 2y agoSomething tells me that if they did it "properly" i.e. scraped and distilled all the world's libraries directly themselves (google streetview style without storing any individual pages) instead of torrent there'd still be backlash for the disruption it brings.
- southernplaces7 2y agoWhy the hell was this flagged too? This site seems to be ever more populated lately with pedants who flag an awful lot of perfectly reasonable content. That the admin lets nearly anyone flag any random thing they dislike is itself a ridiculous piece of nonsense subject to petty, small minded abuse.
- __loam 2y agoWhy was this flagged?
- benterix 2y agoWhy pick up on Meta? OpenAI did this a few years earlier.
- Agraillo 2y agoMy first (almost) thought was "Ok, looking at the llama, where's the quality boost?" I think the explanation is probably in how LLM are trained. Even without knowing deeply the internals, I suspect that it's the compression of information so to simplify you can't make 8GB data contain all the facts of a "bigger" normalized relational database. So they keep the facts present everywhere and often drop rare facts. For example, a fact "SQL was invented at IBM", this fact can be found everywhere, in books, web sites, comments. You don't need access to copyrighted books to acquire this fact. But a first-person account of someone who worked at IBM at that time is probably can be found in a couple of books, but due to "compression", it will be gone anyway
- insane_dreamer 2y agoWhy was this flagged?