Comment by margalabargala
7 hours ago
Well, it is their data.
The word "their" is overloaded, it could mean "thing I have the legal right to", or, "thing I have in my possession right now".
The latter condition is clearly true. It's their data.
If you pretend the other definitions of possession don't exist and claim "aktually it's not theirs they don't have rights to it" then that's on you for faking an incomplete understanding of language.
Well, but if it’s the latter definition, then the AI didn’t train on their data, since the companies took possession of that data before doing a training run.
It’s only the former definition that would allow an AI model to have been trained on someone else’s data
> It’s only the former definition that would allow an AI model to have been trained on someone else’s data
There are yet more definitions of "theirs". For example, data whose provenance can be traced back to Anna's Archive.
So the data is legally owned by the book authors, possessed by Anna's Archive, and downloaded for training usage by the AI companies. Every person in that chain could, linguistically speaking, correctly refer to the data as "theirs", or refer to the data of a different entity as "theirs".
It's their servers sure, but if you download something under a license that doesn't grant you ownership, then it isn't yours.
You are being granted a license to use the data.
Yes, exactly, if you ignore all definitions of "yours" that involve possession then it isn't "yours".
But no one else is obligated to ignore the definitions of words that you're choosing to ignore, so the rest of us will go on saying it's their data.
If you steal my car, no who knows it's stolen would say it's "yours".
We're not talking abstract language concepts, this is a specific case. The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen. AA calling it "our data" is disingenuous. Legally it isn't theirs. While you could use "ours"/"theirs" loosely in English, they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this.
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Guess what, the AI companies training their models aren't going to include themselves in the "rest of us"
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"but if you download something under a license that doesn't grant you ownership, then it isn't yours."
Possession is 9/10 of the law - if you have a copy, you have possession, and thus you have SOMETHING and LEGALLY it is considered yours (now whether you legally obtained it is a different story and THAT is where charges stem from.)
Random nit, the original saying was "possession is 9 points of the law", attributes that strengthened legal claims, rather than a percentage. Things like possession, good lawyer, money, patience, witnesses, for which if you had the object in your possession were likely to be in your favor.