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Comment by TheRoque

1 year ago

To be honest, these companies already stole terabytes of data and don't even disclose their dataset, so you have to assume they'll steal and train at anything you throw at them

"Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" constitutes stealing now?

Seems like an excessively draconian interpretation of property rights.

  • "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators. I'm not making a value judgement one way or the other, but "reading stuff freely posted on the Internet" is an oversimplification.

    • Okay, but "stealing" is also an oversimplification, to the point of absurdity.

      It makes no sense to put stuff up on the internet where it can freely be downloaded by anyone at any time, by people who are then free to do whatever they like with it on their own hardware, then complain that people have downloaded that stuff and done what they liked with it on their own hardware.

      "Having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators" is equally a description of Google.

      25 replies →

    • We didn't seem to mind when Google was doing it back in 1999, or Lycos, Altavista, etc before them... why do we care about the LLM companies doing it now?

      4 replies →

    • I consumed large volumes of data posted on the internet for decades, which generated a lot of value for me, without compensating the creators.

      The only difference is that I (presumably) have a soul.

    • > "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data posted on the Internet for the purpose of generating value for them without compensating the creators.

      The fact that value is being created is irrelevant. The fact that they are making profit is irrelevant. As is non compensation to creators. There isn't any law being broken. Is there?

      Bottom line in real world terms there is no expectation of privacy with a freely open and unrestricted web site. Even if that website said 'you can use this for single use but not mass use' that in itself is not legally or practically enforceable.

      Let's take the example of a Christmas light show. The idea might be (in the homeowners mind) that people, families, will drive by in their cars to enjoy the light show (either a single home or the entire street or most of it). They might think 'we don't want buses full of people who paid to ride the bus' coming down the street. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent that (without the city and laws getting involved) and there is nothing wrong with the fact that the people who provide the bus are making money bringing people to see the light show.

    • > "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" is also very different from a business having machines consume large volumes of data

      ...not if you believe in the right of general-purpose computing. If they have the right to read the data, why don't they have a right to program a computer to do it for them?

      I think we all agree that they're not the good guys here, but this reasoning in particular is troubling.

  • I'm not talking about that, I'm taking about downloading gigabytes of books, and movies and who knows what data (since it's not disclosed) without paying. Those are not freely posted on the internet. Well, not legally anyways.

  • This is a quintessential bad faith comment.

    The reference to terabytes of stolen data refers to copyrighted material. I think you know this but chose to frame it as "stuff freely posted on the internet" in order to mislead and strawman the other comment.

    • I meant it exactly as I said it. I do not agree that any theft occurred, either in law or in spirit, and I believe that reinterpretation of intellectual-property law in order to make it a crime would cause significant harm, greatly outweighing the benefits, as has been the case with every other expansion of intellectual property law I have seen.

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  • Faithfully reproducing something you've previously read while passing it off as your own original work is a violation of the most basic tenets of intellectual property rights.

  • Forgot the 82TB of torrented books Meta has been using for training? I mean, yeah, it’s Meta. No surprise. But I won’t believe for one second that the other players didn’t do a similar thing. They just haven’t been caught yet.

  • so I can take a screenshot from a movie trailer on YouTube and sell posters of it now? I thought copyright still applied to the poor.

  • "Reading stuff freely posted on the internet" that has copyrights to be used in your generative AI service is stealing, is a pretty basic interpretation of property rights.

  • As long as people are being prosecuted for piracy or having their livelihoods compromised for including a 16 second clip of a song, yes.

They stole all that data on the internet yet it’s still not enough and now they want everything on your local drive as well.

No you don't. You don't have to assume people are going to be bad! We should not normalize it either.

  • You don't have to assume people are going to be bad, but it's reasonable and prudent to expect it from people who have already shown themselves to be so (in this context).

    I trust people until they give me cause to do otherwise.

    • Training on personal data people thought was going to remain private vs. stuff out in public view (copyright or not), are two different magnitudes of ethics breaches. Opt OUT instead of Opt IN for this is CRAZY in my opinion. I hope that the reddit post is WRONG on that detail but I seriously doubt it.

      I asked Claude: "If a company has a privacy policy and says they will not train on your data and then decides to change the policy in order "to make the models better for everyone." What should the terms be?"

      The model suggests in the first paragraph or so EXPLICIT OPT IN. Not Opt OUT

    • No, nbulka is correct. People should not shrug off and accept things that are wrong just because it's to be expected. It's one of the worst things you can do because as already pointed out, it just normalizes wrong.