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Meta pirated books to train its AI
- nurettin 2y agoWhy even train LLMs on books with commercial value? Does training on harry potter make an LLM solve real world problems better?
- 31337Logic 2y agoCan we all agree to boycott these fuckers' services by now?
- mksreddy 2y agoInstead use Chinese AI which pirated the same?
- bdangubic 2y agoso that is what boycotting means - going to china eh? nice, count me in! and between china and facebook, it is coin toss but I’d go with china :)
- dijksterhuis 2y agonot using either is also an option.
- barbazoo 2y agoQuite the strawman there.
- mistrial9 2y agothis is similar to situation of War - obviously "wrong" actions bring an advantage that cannot be undone, the winners press onwards without pause.. crowds and commentators are left red in the face and helpless. Extra bonus credit -- the economic empires being built with the wins will have this approach to society built-in .. ordinary becomes normal.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- mycodebreaks 2y agoMeta and ethical practice can’t be in one sentence.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoSure it can: "Meta's internal culture is seemingly hostile to ethical practice".
- upghost 2y agoThere seems to be a precedent with tech companies that if you do a lot of illegal stuff in the beginning you can count on either failing before it matters or you can buy your way out of the consequences. Bonus points if you induce regulatory capture to make sure no one else can follow in your footsteps. Please HN do your thing and prove me wrong or tell me the benefits to society outweigh the cons, because otherwise it's a depressing take.
- xyzzy9563 2y agoDownloading pirated material isn't illegal in the U.S., sharing it is.
- dartos 2y agoReally dude? I think a solid argument can be made that facebook downloaded and shared pirated material with literally every ML employee they had at the time… EDIT: to those who downvoted, why? Do you disagree with what I said?
- xyzzy9563 2y agoSharing something locally doesn't fall under federal copyright law. They don't have jurisdiction.
- badlibrarian 2y agoSee 17 U.S.C. § 501 and DMCA. And define "locally" not that it matters.
- dartos 2y agoYeah right at the start it says > who imports copies or phonorecords into the United States in violation of section 602, is an infringer of the copyright or right of the author, as the case may be. Copying itself is infringing. OC has no clue what they’re talking about.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago"they trust me, dumb fucks" - mark zuckerburg
- lolinder 2y ago> Bulk downloading is often done with BitTorrent, the file-sharing protocol popular with pirates for its anonymity, and downloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. Isn't this a twofold misunderstanding of BitTorrent? I haven't used it much, but I've never believed BitTorrent to be popular for anonymity (is it even truly anonymous?), I thought it was popular because it makes downloading go faster by reducing bottlenecks. Also, choosing not to seed a file is extremely simple in every torrent client I've seen, so it seems a bit of a leap to conclude that Meta seeded the pirated books just because the protocol supports it. I'm far more concerned about the simple fact that they downloaded pirated books at all than I am about the protocol they used to do it.
- pimlottc 2y ago> [D]ownloading with BitTorrent typically involves uploading to other users simultaneously. The key word here is "typically". Mutual sharing is designed into the protocol itself, particularly in the early seeding period, where higher priority is given to peers that re-share their portions of the torrent. Yes, you can turn off uploads, but that's not the default in any client I've ever used. So I don't see anything wrong with saying the typical user will re-upload files.
- lolinder 2y agoBut Meta specifically says they took precautions to not do that, and in every client I've seen the only thing they would have to do is make sure a single checkbox which is prominently visible on the main download modal isn't checked! I'm not objecting to the use of the word "typically", I'm objecting to the explicit suggestion that Meta might have seeded the pirated works. It's unlikely and unnecessary to suggest—there's plenty else wrong with this picture so there was no need to include this idea, it's just a distraction from the real problem.
- stackedinserter 2y agoI "pirated" (read) books to train myself. I guess I owe authors a percentage of my income now.
- HPsquared 2y agoYou paid for those books though, presumably.
- intrasight 2y agoWhat if you borrowed and read your friends book? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
- stackedinserter 2y agoYes, I paid for some. Your point is...?
- binarymax 2y agoLet’s look at this like food, instead of knowledge. You ate a donut, and you got energy. Maybe you’ve eaten 5 donuts per year, for 20 years…so a hundred donuts. Maybe you didn’t pay for all of them, you got some at work or at a friends house. They stole a billion donuts.
- sorokod 2y agoTIL donut https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONUT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DONUT
- WillPostForFood 2y agoThey stole a billion donuts. There thousands of posts on HN defending digital piracy, mocking the government and groups like the RIAA that make poor analogies to theft of physical goods.
- robjan 2y agoThese donuts can be replicated an unlimited number of times for free without depriving the creator of the donuts of their donuts. The analogy doesn't work. The real question is whether the value of these donuts is diminished by being ingested by the AI and it's still not clear.
- wwweston 2y agoThis is one of the reasons there should simply be a big tax on AI profits, assuming they come to pass: they literally require uncompensated training on the sum of human intellectual effort. There is no AI without standing on the shoulders of both giants and thousands of everyday authors. If you're just giving the result back to humanity, OK, there's a case for it being a fair trade, though there's still the question of how to handle the disruption of long tradition of valuing & compensating labor. If you're using it to win capitalism, 50% tax seems starting stakes. Sure, lots of expertise and resources go into the data processing to produce a model that can talk to you, but without the data, the processing doesn't matter (and without the model, we could still do this collectively).
- HPsquared 2y agoTax doesn't reward the authors. Especially foreign authors.
- wwweston 2y agoIt could be structured to reward living authors, mechanical licensing has worked this way. But even if it wasn't -- even if couldn't be -- you could use it to fund all kinds of public goods which would benefit living authors. Maybe even a basic income if it turns out to be successful enough. It's a different pro-social bargain than direct compensation for the fruits of labor, but at least it's still a bidirectional one.
- throwaway548921 2y agoI'm pretty sure Facebook/Meta isn't earning any profits from this. They are mostly doing it to "commoditize their complement" and probably prevent the rise of another company to the Big Tech status.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jckrichabdkejdb 2y agoI wonder if they're excluding "careless people" from the training set.
- elitegolfhub 2y ago[dead]
- mirekrusin 2y agoThey could force trained models to be open weight.
- artninja1988 2y agoLlama models are open weights, so all is well
- mirekrusin 2y agoI know, now it's time to open open ai.
- simonw 2y agoHere's a really interesting line from that story: > In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy” I hadn't heard that idea before. Any IP law experts able to give useful context on that one?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hedayet 2y agoMy take is pretty depressing for a different reason - I understand the outrage against mark zuckerberg for nurturing such culture and making the executive decision, but also understand that at least one engineer was involved in writing and executing the code that does the piracy (with Product Managers and other cross-function employees) And given the importance and visibility of the work, it's pretty obvious - that person wouldn't be a low level engineer either (I'd assume they earn about 1 million dollar a year - IC7+ at Meta) now comes the depressing statement - a solid engineer, who probably don't even need to work another day in their life, is being a puppet of mark zuckerberg and robbing creators. This is depressing to me as an engineer.
- pllbnk 2y agoThat's a very interesting and refreshing take. But that's the culture that has been nurtured in the capitalist present - climb up to the top and push the ladder behind you.
- throw0101b 2y agoSee "Meta torrented & seeded 81.7 TB dataset containing copyrighted data" (Feb 7): * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971446 Also "Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding" (Feb 21): * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43125840
- wseqyrku 2y agoAs Eric Schmidt put it in his infamous conference at Stanford: "It doesn't matter if you steal at first, you will only have to get the lawyers to clean the mess up."