Comment by Terr_
15 hours ago
> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.
One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]
Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.
With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
Is the reputational risk of pirating terabytes of books worse than the reputational risk of shredding (destructively scanning) millions of books?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
> Is the reputational risk of pirating [worse than] destructively scanning
Yes, actually: The blame or bad-reputation for that waste goes to US copyright law and its inanities.
Huh? Anthropic bought the books it seems. They acquired the books fair and square. They ripped up their own books; I may hold that to be sacrilege but those aren't my books. They're not even library books. They're Anthropic's books. Why should I care if they burn the books they've legally acquired? They don't even seem to be rare or coveted copies. I'm just happy for the secondhand booksellers who made bank from the transaction.
Fair enough. I don't use Facebook at all because I don't respect or trust the company or it's mission. I do use Gemini and Claude though.
Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.
Google is an ad company, I'd be very.... cautious with the trust here.
https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...
More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.