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How do you feel about the integrity of the machine learning researchers over the past twenty years who trained models on scraped internet data that weren't part

• lukewarm707 1mo ago
  i think that this case, if they did train on buckmaster and alpöge, amounts to an attempt to steal the millenium prize, bypassing all attribution. legally speaking, the default privacy notice gives them an irrevocable license to your content. they may read and use the prompts for research. so it is very possible they simply stole the navier-stokes solution. that is the same principle as any other prompt but this would be a concrete example. there would be some difference between simply giving the model some prompts to read, which they are entitled to do on the default policy, and putting it into aggregate training data.
• ryan_n 1mo ago
  If they scraped internet data in the same way as current day frontier labs do, then I feel the same exact way about them. Why would I feel any different if that is the case?
  • simonw 1mo ago
    My point is that researchers and academics really have been doing this for decades - it's the reason projects like Common Crawl and LAION exist. I think it's notable that nobody was calling out those researchers for their lack of integrity, because the systems they were building did not seem like a threat to anyone. OpenAI etc get accused of a lack of integrity on this precisely because the systems they are building work, and are profitable. My personal opinion here is that integrity is more about what you build with the data. I think saying "scraping means you lack integrity" is a simplification.
    • smcg 1mo ago
      you massively collapsed what AI companies have been doing by comparing it to old internet-scraping. Facebook flat-out admitted that they scanned copyrighted books for their AI. The image generators most definitely trained on copyrighted images.
      • ryan_n 1mo ago
        LAION and Common Crawl both scraped copyrighted images. From what I can tell (I'm not an expert in this domain at all), the main difference between those two and frontier labs is in how they stored and used the data. CC and LAION seem to be actually open (unlike "Open"AI) and are more centered around publicly sharing the data they scrape to support research and innovation. OpenAI et al also stole everything from everyone. But then they raised billions of dollars from that data and sell back their LLM to people (again, among other things). They are also very much NOT open in any way, aside from sharing their benchmarks of new models.
        • needfish 1mo ago
          Personal two cents, I have friends whose music work posted on YouTube were scraped to be in LAION-DISCO-12M, so yeah not very open.
          • ryan_n 1mo ago
            What I meant more is that the dataset they scrape is openly available for download by anyone, unlike any of the frontier labs. Not that they don’t scrape copyrighted content. Still sketch, but at least they don’t call themselves “OpenLAION”. Also my understanding was they’re not storing the actual music, but the metadata and a link to the YouTube video.
        • ccgreg 1mo ago
          Common Crawl is text-only.
      • simonw 1mo ago
        Anthropic too, and evidently others. Amazon were recently confirmed to be doing the same thing: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/ https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-...
    • ryan_n 1mo ago
      You're right, it was an over simplification. I think public exchange of data is great for innovation and research (Common Crawl/LAION). But I still think scraping proprietary data without consent or attribution is generally bad (also Common Crawl/LAION). Then you have OpenAI etc.. who build these multi-billion (trillion??) dollar machines and sell them back to people, using everyone's proprietary data, and (among other things) tell everyone it's going to take their jobs. That combination of things doesn't scream integrity to me. Still, it's undeniable that these machines could be beneficial for humanity (cancer research and such). So, I'm sure many people would say the good out-ways the bad. I don't know. Seems that would set a risky precedent for future companies, but maybe not.
• fn-mote 1mo ago
  > who trained models on scraped internet data The strongest complaint is that they trained on a huge corpus of pirated copyrighted works. It’s a large step above “scraping” and well into the “everyone acknowledges this is illegal” territory.
  • deleted 1mo ago
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