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X changes its terms to bar training of AI models using its content
- echelon 1y agoIf an artist or author can't do this, social media shouldn't be able to do it either. If Xai wants to train on public corpus, it shouldn't be allowed to prevent its own corpus from being used. We need regulations to limit the power grabs. Train all you like, but don't dare try to constrain to your walled gardens. We should also probably nip the "foundation model company / also a social media company" conglomeration in the bud.
- mgraczyk 1y agoArtists can do this, and they do
- loudmax 1y agoYes, but do artists have the ability to actually monitor and enforce this? You have to have the capacity and the wherewithal and to test these models to even know that your data is being ingested into AI. Big companies like the New York Times and Twitter/X have the funds to pay for this. Miscellaneous artists probably don't.
- teeray 1y ago> If an artist or author can't do this, social media shouldn't be able to do it either. Even if this is done, the case of starving artist v. megacorp will probably go to whoever wields the most money and lawyers. To add insult to injury, the artist’s opponent is fueled by their ill-gotten gains.
- yndoendo 1y agoThis is dependent on country. USA, yes with their draconian methods. Countries like the UK, the looser of the suit pays all the cost. UK layers have no problem taking low wealth client cases they know will win. UK allows for David vs Goliath and David to win. US up lifts Goliath as a God.
- bonoboTP 1y agoAlso in many countries legal costs are just generally lower than in the US.
- anticensor 1y agoHowever the loser pays vs. both parties pay isn't uniform across all possible lawsuit types even in America or in England. Adding to that, even in loser pays regimes, both parties have to pay upfront and then the winner is refunded the costs.
- teeray 1y ago> both parties have to pay upfront and then the winner is refunded the costs. Exactly. It’s about which party can sustain the greater cash flow.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoSocial media should do it to set a legal precedent. > We need regulations to limit the power grabs. Train all you like, but don't dare try to constrain to your walled gardens. No, no one should train, period.
- echelon 1y ago> No, no one should train, period. I get that you have your own opinion, but I'm personally tired of living in the butter-churning era and would prefer that this all went a bit faster. I want my real time super high fidelity holo sim, all of my chores to be automatically done, protein folding, drug discovery. The life extension, P = NP future. No more incrementalism. If the universe only happens once, and we're only awake for a geological blink of an eye, I'd rather we have an exciting time than just be some paper-pushing animals that pay taxes and vanish in a blip. I'd be really excited if we found intelligent aliens, had advanced cloning for organ transplants and longevity, developed a colony on Mars, and invented our robotic successor species. Xbox and whatever most normal people look forward to on a day to day basis are boring.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoThere is already a beautiful, exciting world out there full of animals and plants and we don't need AI or some computer crap to experience it. The problem is, creating all this AI and advanced technology is directly crushing that world.
- DaSHacka 1y ago> The problem is, creating all this AI and advanced technology is directly crushing that world. Do you have a source for this?
- vouaobrasil 1y agoThis increase: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/carbon-dioxide/ Would not be possible without the continued advancement of technology. Technology allows us to rapidly expand the human population, see all of the healthcare and transportation technology, which has resulted in a vastly higher extinction rate. Pretty much all the damage we have done on earth is only possible due to advanced technology.
- jimbokun 1y agoIf social media can do this, an artist or author should be able to do it, too.
- delichon 1y ago> “You shall not and you shall not attempt to (or allow others to) […] use the X API or X Content to fine-tune or train a foundation or frontier model,” it reads. If I have a service where a user enters any URL, like a tweet from X, and the service translates it, then if the user approves of the translation I train a translation model on that, does that violate this term?
- matwood 1y agoWeird this just happened. I assumed all sites with any sort of content changed their terms soon after ChatGPT hit the scene.
- nailer 1y agoYep, from https://the-decoder.com/reddit-ends-its-role-as-a-free-ai-training-data-goldmine/ https://the-decoder.com/reddit-ends-its-role-as-a-free-ai-tr... : You must not, and must not allow those acting on your behalf to: ...use the Data APIs to encourage or promote illegal activity or violation of third party rights (including using User Content to train a machine learning or AI model without the express permission of rightsholders in the applicable User Content);
- soulofmischief 1y agoIn my eyes that is considered fair use, and I think the courts will come to agree unless they are financially incentivized to look the other way and thus create a moat for existing players at the expense of newcomers.
- michaelcampbell 1y ago"its content" indeed.
- blibble 1y agowish I could change my terms to bar training of AI models on my content
- vouaobrasil 1y agoSame here! It should be a default. Unfortunately, the very openness of the internet is now working against us.
- soulofmischief 1y agoWhy should it be a default? Can you prove that training a model on data you wrote is not fair use? We're already seeing precedent that it might be. https://www.ecjlaw.com/ecj-blog/kadrey-v-meta-the-first-major-test-of-fair-use-in-the-age-of-generative-ai-by-jason-l-haas https://www.ecjlaw.com/ecj-blog/kadrey-v-meta-the-first-majo... The openness of the internet is a good thing, but it doesn't come without a cost. And the moment we have to pay that cost, we don't get to suddenly go, "well, openness turned out to be a mistake, let's close it all up and create a regulatory, bureaucratic nightmare". This is the tradeoff. Freedom for me, and thee.
- baseballdork 1y agoThe burden is on the user to show that it is fair use, no? Not everyone else's responsibility to prove that it's _not_ fair use.
- soulofmischief 1y agoIt is definitely the responsibility of anyone suing someone who trained a model on copyrighted data to prove that it isn't fair use, they have to show how it violated law, and while it's in the best interest of those organizations to make things easier for the court by showing why it is fair use, they are technically innocent until proven guilty. Accordingly, anyone on the internet who wants to make comments about how they should be able to prevent others from training models on their data needs to demonstrate competence with respect to copyright by explaining why it's not fair use, as currently it is undecided in law and not something we can just take for granted. Otherwise, such commenters should probably just let the courts work this one out or campaign for a different set of protection laws, as copyright may not be sufficient for the kind of control they are asking over random developers or organizations who want to train a statistical model on public data.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoThere needs to be a worldwide standard, such as an HTML tag, that says "no training". And a few countries need to make it a punishable offense to violate the tag. The punishment should be exceptionally severe, not just a fine. For example: any company that violates the tag should be completely barred from operating, forever.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- twostorytower 1y agoIt needs to be incorporated into the robots.txt standard.
- anigbrowl 1y agoThat will just lead to situations where one company scrapes the site, cleans the content of tags, and sells the data, and another does the training on the precleaned data. The first one hasn't trained and the second one never saw the tag.
- vouaobrasil 1y agoCompanies who are found guilty of this should also be rendered bankrupt then.
- vharuck 1y agoThis isn't a new concept in law. It's similar to buying goods that were stolen or procured through illegal means. Here's the US law that applies when it happens across state lines: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2315 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2315 Note that it requires the defendant to know the goods were illegally taken. Can be hard to prove, but not impossible for companies with email trails. The fun question is, what will the analog be for the government confiscating the illegally "taken" data? A guarantee of deletion and requirement to retrain the model from scratch?
- kiratp 1y agoThat will play out exactly like the "Do not track" bit did.
- Animats 1y agoIt would be interesting to have a "classical AI model", trained on the contents of the Harvard libraries before 1926 and now out of copyright.
- kibwen 1y agoCareful, you might create an artificial superintelligence that way. Safer to just train on the Twitter dataset.
- Shadowmist 1y agothat’s how you end up with an Artificial Idiot.
- mbg721 1y agoIf you thought AI now had out-of-control racism...
- gausswho 1y agoIt does surprise me that we haven't seen nations revise their copyright window back to something sensible in a play to seed their own nascent AI industry. The American founding fathers thought 20 years was enough. I'm sure there'd be repercussions in the banking system, but at some point it might be worth the trade.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoHow useful is low-quality content like Youtube comments and tweets anyway? Is it a common/important use case to generate tweet-length, tweet-quality content? Are most use cases of generating tweet-type content spam/fraud? Would a model be better off if it was unable to perform those use cases?
- redox99 1y agoEven if SNR is low, there is some information that only exists on X, or at least is the primary source. Just look at how many submissions on HN are X posts.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoBefore Musk bought it Twitter was broadly disliked here and there were regularly calls in the comments to disallow submissions from there. Given how it's degraded in completely non-partisan ways (blocking of alternative clients, features removed from free tier, paid subscription tiers below $40/month still have ads, proliferation of spam from paid placement bots in comments) I can't understand how positive sentiment comes from a place other than virtue signaling alignment with Musk and his values.
- lesuorac 1y agoWho's training an AI on the "Tweet" button text? Or are they trying to forgo section 230 protection and claim ownership of content uploaded to the site?
- lambertsimnel 1y agoPerhaps they want the prohibition on using the site content for AI training to be considered based on something other than their ownership of it, like bandwidth usage or users' rights
- HenryBemis 1y agoThey will get paid to share our (your) data and they will use the money for infra and new yachts.
- lambertsimnel 1y agoIndeed, but I'm speculating that they do that without owning the data or even claiming to. That's consistent with the article, but I haven't read the other relevant documents. Maybe they have a license to use the data. Maybe the license allows or requires them to try to restrict others' AI training, regardless of their non-ownership of it. Maybe that serves multiple purposes, in which case they could point to whichever shows them in the best light.
- GuB-42 1y agoThese are just terms of service, not copyright. It means that assuming training AI models is fair use (if it wasn't AI companies including xAI would be in trouble), they can't really stop you. But now, essentially, they are telling you that they can block your account or IP address if you do. Which I believe they can for basically any reason anyways.
- grugagag 1y agoHow would they know you’re training some LLM though?
- ronsor 1y agoI'm not sure how this will work as crawlers don't read or accept ToS.
- MoonGhost 1y agoIt will not as long as search engines have access. Which means Google and OpenAI through MS Bing, that's at least. Without search engines what the point in posting it on open net if nobody can find.
- voidUpdate 1y agoThis refers to the API, which you would have to manually attach a bot to so that it could scrape things
- cameldrv 1y agoNaturally I'm sure Grok reads the terms of service on every website it scrapes and doesn't use content from sites that prohibit it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kyle-rb 1y agoI've never signed up for the X developer program, so I'm not bound by these terms. But I did download an archive of my data last week. Do I have implicit permission to use that data (~150k liked tweets) to train AI models? Or is there stuff in the user agreement that separately prohibits this? Obviously barring normal copyright law which is still up in the air.
- josefritzishere 1y agoIf you live in the EU, GDPR dictates that you own your data generally speaking. If you're in the US it varies by state if you have any rights at all.
- MoonGhost 1y agoIf you own your face that doesn't mean nobody can take a picture on the street.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThat is partly true, there are carve outs for public spaces. But what they can do with that image is still governed by the GDPR in the EU.
- tempaccountabcd 1y ago[dead]
- archagon 1y agoOh, that must be nice. And what should I do as a blogger to get the same privilege for my content? We are in an age of corporate “piracy for me, but not for thee.”
- MonkeyClub 1y ago> We are in an age of corporate “piracy for me, but not for thee.” Rather, we are back to that age of state- (now corporate-) backed privateering.
- ulfw 1y ago[flagged]
- zombot 1y agoRight, stealing training data from others is OK, having it stolen from you is not. What else is new?
- keyle 1y agoNew logo every couple of years and Bob's your uncle.
- threeseed 1y agoAlmost certainly the easter egg found in the Trump "Big Beautiful Bill" which prevents states from enacting AI regulations also came from Musk. That way he can continue to steal from others and lock competitors out whilst being comfortable knowing that no laws will be enacted to prevent it.
- mgoetzke 1y agowhy do you think he is so evil but all others are benign ?
- littlestymaar 1y agoNone of them are benign. He's the only one to have been in a government office though, and he's also batshit crazy, which makes him even more dangerous than the other oligarchs.
- HenryBemis 1y agoHe is not "batshit crazy", or maybe he is. But he is making the next generation of ICBMs for the US government, sorry.. he is making super-duper rockets that will definitely take people to Mars and his companies/creations will be the very first tech ever to _not_ be used for war and death!!! (he wrote while laughing). So that settles it (all).
- labster 1y agoYep, Musk saying he’s going to fund primary campaigns against congressmembers who vote for the Big Beautiful Bill is all just a brilliant bit of reverse psychology. Or more likely, Congress is super worried about Roko’s Basilisk.
- risyachka 1y agoGood luck with that. Pretty sure at this point no one cares. Literally every AI model is trained on copyrighted etc data. And without any consequences.
- Duskgmxx 1y ago[dead]
- seydor 1y agoVAT for content should be a thing. Ultimately all users should be getting paid
- guywithahat 1y agoSo I get to use the platform for free, but I also get paid to post on the platform? I'm not sure that makes sense. Like I hate to take the side of big tech, but they can't literally be paying users to use their platform. Just use something else, there are a million social media sites
- seydor 1y agoGoogle indexes your website for free, and it will pay you to put ads in it. That's also what all social media do , they put ads on your thoughts. They dont even need to index your thoughts because you submit them directly. It has nothing to do with being free, it's about incentives. Users are so foolish , they give everything for free, unlike webmasters.
- Reason077 1y agoYou don’t use the platform for free, unless you’re using an ad blocker. But that’s also, probably, against the TOS?
- MonkeyClub 1y ago> I get to use the platform for free You actually get to generate content for the platform for free. Without you (all of the X users), the platform would be devoid of content, just botspeak and corporate promos. Plus, as the sibling mentioned, they monetize your visit through ads (and data use).
- jaoane 1y agoMost posts are ignored and are an absolute loss to the company. Which is why platforms like Twitter only allow you to make money from posting once you reach a certain threshold.
- Sleepthinker 1y ago[dead]
- visarga 1y agoCopyright is not going well. The rights of millions of people are trampled by companies, both the content we post on social networks and our private AI chats. Our voice doesn't matter. Copyright was supposed to protect expression and keep ideas freely circulating. But now it protects abstractions (see the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test). It is much more difficult to be sure you are not infringing.
- eviks 1y agoIt seems like it was supposed to do the exact opposite per cursory wiki reading: > The concept of copyright first developed in England. In reaction to the printing of "scandalous books and pamphlets", the English Parliament passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662,[16] which required all intended publications to be registered with the government-approved Stationers' Company, giving the Stationers the right to regulate what material could be printed.[20] > The Statute of Anne, enacted in 1710 in England and Scotland, provided the first legislation to protect copyrights (but not authors' rights)
- pergadad 1y agoCopyright has nothing to do with free expression but was intended to protect the interests of publishers. When the printing press arrived basically any popular book or booklet was quickly copied by others. This meant the original publisher (and sometimes the author, but usually they were paid one-off) saw nothing of the profit.
- lcnmrn 1y agoI allow all robots and even provide a sitemap on Subreply, a social network I created.
- petesergeant 1y agoThe only story here is that it took 2 months for them to do this after being "bought" by xAI.
- thih9 1y agoI think the rules should be stricter. I’d prefer an explicit opt in from the content author being required for anyone to perform any model training with any given data. Alternatively, require all weights, prompts and chat logs to have the same visibility as the original datasets. None of this is going to happen and current decisions about uncopyrightable ai[1] are already good; but still, it feels like there is room for abuse. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre_D%27op%C3%A9ra_Spatial https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre_D%27op%C3%...
- eru 1y agoWell, you explicitly opt-in to Twitter ToS whenever you post anything there.
- thih9 1y agoThis is not opt-in how I understand it. When there is no alternative, or the alternative is not using a service, I'd call it a hard requirement instead. I like how opt-in is handled by GDPR; e.g.: "Consent must be a specific, freely given, plainly worded, and unambiguous affirmation given by the data subject (...) A data controller may not refuse service to users who decline consent to processing that is not strictly necessary in order to use the service.", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
- eru 1y ago> When there is no alternative, or the alternative is not using a service, I'd call it a hard requirement instead. There's plenty of alternatives to Twitter.
- bamboozled 1y agoThis guy is just painful
- foldr 1y agoThis could lead to a precipitous increase in the performance of the AI models.
- xiaoyu2006 1y agoAs if anyone will follow.
- mrweasel 1y agoIt's that like half of Xs business model, selling data to other companies? Right now no one is as data hungry as AI companies, so it seems strange to cut them off. I can understand wanting to charge a premium for the access, if it's for AI, but straight up saying no seems like a strange business move.
- SilverBirch 1y agoHow much do you think Musk values X being a viable independent business vs using it accelerate X AI? I would expect Musk values the first as approximately 0 value, and the second as being 100% of the value. So it makes total sense to exploit the fact that X and X AI are the same company.
- mrweasel 1y agoThat's a good point. Other than Meta, X (AI) is the only AI company that "generates" it's own training data and we haven't really seen Musk trying to increase X revenue, of trying to run it cheaper.
- narrator 1y agoElon mentioned that the earlier rate limiting was for preventing training the real-time AI propaganda deathstar, and to avoid X becoming bot hell, which is an ongoing problem. This move is probably for similar reasons. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
- like_any_other 1y agoIn contrast, I'm glad ISPs allow "their" content to be used so permissively.
- Hizonner 1y agoBy "its content", X of course means your content.
- nly 1y agoExcept xAI which will no doubt get permission at some point.
- cbanek 1y agoWho'd want to steal from that cesspool anyway? Same for reddit, I can't imagine getting reddit memes spit at me from ChatGPT. But yeah, I bet both of them are being used quite liberally.