Comment by GaryBluto
13 hours ago
> I'm now reluctant to share my photos publicly because I don't like the feeling that my work will be slurped up for AI model training..
I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
No they haven’t. Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
> Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
Is this true?
Yes, it is.
I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed.
In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a little over a year.
2 replies →
> People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
People, yes. The possibility of one person using a copyrighted work that I uploaded to the internet is very different in scope to that of a corporation with billions of dollars in funding using the same work to generate a product that automates the creation of similar such works.
I agree. Back in the day hackers were for the free enablement and usage of all data, code and media included. Now it seems everyone has turned into copyright hawks which ironically only entrench big players via regulatory capture so say goodbye to actual open source AI models, they're too poor to license content while big tech companies can.
The mantra, at least in German hacker scene, is: "use public data, protect private data"
Published data is somewhere in the middle. But open source movement was always around copyright. FSF uses Copyright in Form of "copyleft" GPL for their agenda as does more business focussed open source movement. They are all purposely not using "public domain"
Yes, there is also the pirating scene, "opening" up works and pushing copyright law, but only few advocate complete abolishment of copyright.
Open source was always around copyright because it was in spite of copyright not because of it, to fight against the notion of copyright using copyright itself as a tool, with copyleft as you mentioned. That is to say, the goals or values of the open source movements would be much better achieved if there weren't copyright in the first place, especially now that it's twisted to serve only big corporations and how books from over 50 years ago still aren't in the public domain due to Mickey Mouse laws for example. I am one of those few who do advocate for its abolishment.
There are also potential legal issues with public domain, especially in Europe where some rights can't always be disclaimed. There are OSI open source public domain licenses like the MIT-0 license.
1 reply →
How hard is it to understand "I want to share what Ive done, but I dont want predatory companies taking my work, profiting on it, and offering absolutely nothing in return."
It will end up distilled into open-weights models.
Do you think that if you write a book directly inspired by another you should be required to pay the author of the book that inspired you?
That's a false equivalence. Humans occasionally cause food poisoning at potlucks, and it's self-evident why we should hold McDonald's to a much higher standard due to the sheer scale of harm it can cause. A human, even when hopped up on stimulants, can't do a fraction of what a corporations with whole data centers can do.
4 replies →
Are these hypothetical books being written by "predatory companies?"
For some, feeding the beast is unpleasant
> I cannot understand this mindset. People have been able to do anything they want to copies of things uploaded to the internet for ages.
Right? On the one hand there was the mystery of what might happen with your photos and on the other there is the plain, inescapable knowledge that they will be donated to like four dude’s tech companies to make money off of without acknowledgement or compensation. That’s basically the same thing
i guess people who don't create anything can't understand how this feels, the day you check one of those massive image dataset they train on and see all your images... horrible feeling
You cannot understand the fact that people don’t work their work stolen by corporations to train their very-much-for-profit bullshit generators… I mean, AI models?
Please.
> bullshit generators
Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
> Do you call operating systems "malware enablers"?
People were making that exact criticism of Microsoft Windows for decades.
It's only really in the last decade that Windows got decent enough at security for this attitude to wear off.
i don't understand you want us to be happy that they take our work? so that their machine can reproduce it?
2 replies →