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you massively collapsed what AI companies have been doing by comparing it to old internet-scraping. Facebook flat-out admitted that they scanned copyrighted boo

by smcg 18d 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 18d 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 17d 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 17d 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 17d ago
  Common Crawl is text-only.
simonw 18d 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-...
- dgellow 18d ago
  And that’s bad, right?
  - simonw 17d ago
    It's legal. I wouldn't do that myself, but I guess that's why I don't train models for a frontier AI lab.
    - mahogany 17d ago
      The thread is not really about what's legal; the topic is integrity. It sounds like, based on the fact that you wouldn't do it yourself, you agree that it's not a good thing to do.

by smcg 18d ago

ryan_n 18d 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 17d 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 17d 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 17d ago
Common Crawl is text-only.

simonw 18d 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-...

dgellow 18d ago
And that’s bad, right?
- simonw 17d ago
  It's legal. I wouldn't do that myself, but I guess that's why I don't train models for a frontier AI lab.
  - mahogany 17d ago
    The thread is not really about what's legal; the topic is integrity. It sounds like, based on the fact that you wouldn't do it yourself, you agree that it's not a good thing to do.