Comment by devmor
3 years ago
Baffling to see anyone argue against this technology when it is a non-issue to any model by simply acquiring only training data you have permission to use.
3 years ago
Baffling to see anyone argue against this technology when it is a non-issue to any model by simply acquiring only training data you have permission to use.
The reason people are arguing against this technology is that no one is using them in the way you describe. They actually wouldn't even be economically viable in that case.
If it is not economically viable for you to be ethical, then you do not deserve economic success.
Anyone arguing against this technology following the line of reasoning you present is operating in adverse to the good of society. Especially if their only motive is economic viability.
I feel like you read my comment and interpreted it in exactly the opposite way it was intended because I agree with you, and you're making the same point I was trying to make.
1 reply →
I don't know if asking permission of every copyright holder of every image on the Internet is as simple as you're implying.
I think people 100% have the right to use this on their images, but:
> simply acquiring only training data you have permission to use
Currently it's generally infeasible to obtain licenses at the required scale.
When attempting to develop a model that can describe photos for visually impaired users, I had even tried to reach out to obtain a license from Getty. They repeatedly told me that they don't license images for machine learning[0].
I think it's easy to say "well too bad, it doesn't deserve to exist" if you're just thinking about DALL-E 3, but there's a huge number of positive and far less-controversial applications of machine learning that benefit from web-scale pretraining and foundation models - spam filtering, tumour segmentation, voice transcription, language translation, defect detection, etc.
[0]: https://i.imgur.com/iER0BE2.png
I don't believe it's a "doesn't deserve to exist" situation, because these things genuinely can be used for the public good.
However - and this is a big however - I don't believe it deserves the legal protection to be used for profit.
I am of the opinion that if you train your model on data that you do not hold the rights for, your usage should be handled similarly to most fair use laws. It's fine to use it for your personal projects, for research and education, etc. but it is not OK to use it for commercial endeavors.
> It's fine to use it for your personal projects, for research and education, etc. but it is not OK to use it for commercial endeavors.
Say I train a machine vision model that, after having pretrained on ImageNet or similar, detects deformities in a material for a small company that manufactures that material. Do you not think that would be fair use, despite being commercial?
To me it seems highly transformative (a defect detection model is entirely outside the original images' purposes) and does not at all impact the market of the works.
Moreover, you said it was "Baffling to see anyone argue against this technology" but it seems there are at least some models (like if my above detector was non-commercial) that you're ethically okay with and could be affected by this poisoning.
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