this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Good. Technology always makes strides before the law can catch up. The issue with this is that multi million dollar companies use these gaps in the law to get away with legally gray and morally black actions all in the name of profits.
Edit: This video is the best way to educate yourself on why ai art and writing is bad when it steals from people like most ai programs currently do. I know it's long, but it's broken up into chapters if you can't watch the whole thing.
Totally agree. I don't care that my data was used for training, but I do care that it's used for profit in a way that only a company with big budget lawyers can manage
But if we're drawing the line at "did it for profit", how much technological advancement will happen? I suspect most advancement is profit driven. Obviously people should be paid for any work they actually put in, but we're talking about content on the internet that you willingly create for fun and the fact it's used by someone else for profit is a side thing.
And quite frankly, there's no way to pay you for this. No company is gonna pay you to use your social media comments to train their AI and even if they did, your share would likely be pennies at best. The only people who would get paid would be companies like reddit and Twitter, which would just write into their terms of service that they're allowed to do that (and I mean, they already use your data for targeting ads and it's of course visible to anyone on the internet).
So it's really a choice between helping train AI (which could be viewed as a net benefit for society, depending on how you view those AIs) vs simply not helping train them.
Also, if we're requiring payment, only the super big AI companies can afford to frankly pay anything at all. Training an AI is already so expensive that it's hard enough for small players to enter this business without having to pay for training data too (and at insane prices, if Twitter and Reddit are any indication).
Hundreds of projects in github are supported by donations, innovation happens even without profit incentives. It may slow down the pace of AI development but I am willing to wait anothrt decade for AIs if it protects user data and let's regulation catch up.
Reddit is currently trying to monetize their user comments and other content by charging for API access. Which creates a system where only the corporations profit and the users generating the content are not only unpaid, but expected to pay directly or are monetized by ads. And if the users want to use the technogy trained by their content they also have to pay for it.
Sure seems like a great deal for corporations and users getting fleeced as much as possible.
I'm honestly at a loss for why people are so up at arms about OAI using this practice and not Google or Facebook or Microsoft, ect. It really seems we're applying a double standard just because people are a bit pissed at OpenAI for a variety of reasons, or maybe just vaguely mad at the monetary scale of "tech giants"
My 2 cents: I don't think content posted on the open internet (especially content produced by users on a free platform being claimed not by those individuals but by the platforms themselves) should be litigated over, when that information isnt even being reproduced but being used on derivative works. I think it's conceptually similar to an individual reading a library of books to become a writer and charge for the content they produce.
I would think a piracy community would be against platforms claiming ownership over user generated content at all.
https://youtu.be/9xJCzKdPyCo
This video can answer just about any question you ask. It's long, but it's split up into chapters so you can see what questions he's answering in that chapter. I do recommend you watch the whole thing if you can. There's a lot of information that I found very insightful and thought provoking
Couple things:
While I appreciate this gentleman's copywrite experience, I do have a couple comments:
his analysis seems primarily focused from a law perspective. While I don't doubt there is legal precedent for protection under copywrite law, my personal opinion is that copywrite is a capitalist conception that is dependent on an economic reality I fundamentally disagree with. Copywrite is meant to protect the livelihoods of artists, but I don't think anyone's livelihood should be dependent on having to sell labor. More often, copywrite is used to protect the financial interests of large businesses, not individual artists. The current litigation is between large media companies and OAI, and any settlement isn't likely to remunerate much more than a couple dollars to individual artists, and we can't turn back the clock to before AI could displace the jobs of artists, either.
I'm not a lawyer, but his legal argument is a little iffy to me... Unless I misunderstood something, he's resting his case on a distinction between human inspiration (i.e. creative inspiration on derivative works) and how AI functions practically (i.e. AI has no subjective "experience" so it cannot bring its own "hand" to a derivative work). I don't see this as a concrete argument, but even if I did, it is still no different than individual artists creating derivative works and crossing the line into copywrite infringement. I don't see how this argument can be blanket applied to the use of AI, rather than individual cases of someone using AI on a project that draws too much from a derivative work.
The line is even less clear when discussing LLMs as opposed to T2I or I2I models, which I believe is what is being discussed in the lawsuit against OAI. Unlike images from DeviantArt and Instagram, text datasets from sources like reddit, Wikipedia, and Twitter aren't protected under copywrite like visual media. The legal argument against the use of training data drawn from public sources is even less clear, and is even more removed to protecting the individual users and is instead a question of protecting social media sites with questionable legal claim to begin with. This is the point id expect this particular community would take issue with: I don't think reddit or Twitter should be able to claim ownership over their user's content, nor do I think anyone should be able to revoke consent over fair use just because it threatens our status quo capitalist system.
AI isn't going away anytime soon, and litigating over the ownership of the training data is only going to serve to solidify the dominant hold over our economy by a handful of large tech giants. I would rather see large AI models be nationalized, or otherwise be protected from monopolization.
I don't really have the time to look for timestamps, but he does present his arguments from many different angles. I highly recommend watching the whole thing if you can.
Aside from that, the main thing I want to address is the responsibility of these big corporations to curate the massive library of content they gather. It's entirely in their power to blacklist certain things like PII or sensitive information or hate speech, but they decided not to because it was cheaper. They took a gamble that people either wouldn't care, didn't have the resources to fight it, or would actively support their theft if it meant getting a new toy to play with.
Now that there's a chance they could lose a massive amount of money, this could deter other ai companies from flagrantly breaking the law and set a better standard that protects people's personal data. Tbh I don't really think this specific case has much ground to stand on, but it's the first step in securing more safety for people online. Imagine if the database for this ai was leaked. Imagine all of the personal data, yours and mine included, that would be available to malicious people. Imagine the damage that could cause.
They do curate the data somewhat, though it's not easy to verify if they did since they don't share their data set (likely because they expect legal challenge)
There's no evidence they have "personal data" beyond direct textual data scraped from platforms such as reddit (much of which is disembodied from other metadata). I care FAR more about data google, facebook, or microsoft has leaking than I do text written on my old reddit or twitter account, and somehow we're not wringing our hands about that data collection.
I watched most of that video, and i'm frankly not moved by much of it. The video seems primarily (if not entirely) written in response to generative image models and image data that may actually be protected under existing copywrite, unlike the textual data in question in this particular lawsuit. Despite that, I think his interpretation of "derivative work" hand waving is flimsy at best, and relies on a materialist perspective that I just can't identify with (a pragmatic framework might be more persuasive to me). A case-by-case basis of copywrite infringement of the use of AI tools is the most solid argument he makes, but I am just not persuaded that all AI is theft based on publicly accessible data being used as training data. And i just don't think copywrite law is an ideal solution to a growing problem with technological automation and ever increasing levels of productivity and stagnating levels of demand.
I'm open to being wrong, but i think copywrite law doesn't address the long-term problems introduced by AI and is instead a shortcut to maintaining a status quo destined to failure regardless.