this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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I assume AI is training off the content here for free.
Yes, but there's no contract to give them legal cover if anyone ever does anything about all the content they steal.
And ya know what? Frankly, if AI is going to harvest all this shit, I'd rather fuckers like spez couldn't get rich off it in the process. Granted I'm not happy the tech bros running these AI companies are getting rich with these fucking things, but I can at least take solace that, for Lemmy at least, there isn't some asshole middle man making bank off the work and words of users they never paid a dime to.
Genuinely, why does Sepz and Reddit deserve to make money off anything we posted? Why does any social media site? They make the site, pay for the servers, maintain the apps, sure, and they can get compensation for that, I don't see a problem there. But why does any social media company deserve to get rich when the only thing that makes their platform valuable is the people that post to it? Reddit didn't even have paid mods, the community did all the work on the content of that site, why in the fuck do we tolerate these assholes making profit off it like this?
This is sad to read because I agree with all of it (except the casual sexism).
Look at this thread. People delete their posts on Reddit. Which means that they can no longer be scraped for free. Which means they are now exclusively available in Reddit's archive. It's not that people tolerate it. It's that the first instinct of people who don't tolerate it, is to make it worse. What can you do?
100%
Intellectual property theft
What do you mean? What legal cover do they need against what actions?
If the EU (or any other governments) decide that AI can't legally train their models on information they don't own or license (I don't know how that would work legally but they talk about it), then this company that Reddit has sold access to could argue to lawmakers that they have license for all the content on Reddit. I don't know that it would hold up, but I suspect it's part of the company's perceived value in this Reddit deal.
I was curious if a
robots.txtequivalent exists for AI training data, and there was some solid points here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34324208
I still think we should have the ability to opt out like we do with search engines and webcrawlers, but if the algorithm works ideally and learns but does not recycle content, is it truly any different from a factory of workers pumping out clones of popular series on Amazon? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
The problem is not the technology, the problem is the businesses and the people behind them.
These tools were made with the explicit purpose of taking the content that they did not create, repurposing them, and creating a product. Throw all these conversation about intelligence and learning out the fucking window, what matters is what the thing does, and why it was created to do that thing.
Until we reach a point where there is some sort of AI out there that has any semblance of free will, and can choose not to learn if fed certain information, and choose not to respond to input given to it without being programmed to do not respond, then we are not talking about intelligence, we are talking about a tool. No matter how they dress it up.
Stop arguing about this on their terms, because they're gaslighting the fuck out of you.
Afaik the OpenAI bot may choose to ignore it? At least that's what another user claimed it does.
Robots.txt has been always ignored by some bots, it's just a guideline originally meant to prevent excessive bandwidth usage by search indexing bots and is entirely voluntary.
Archive.org bot for example has completely ignored it since 2017.
This is kinda my take on it. However, the way I see it is that the AI isn't intelligent enough yet to truly create something original. As such, right now AI is closer to being a tool than a being. Because of that, it somewhat bothers me that I'm being used to teach a tool. If I thought that companies like OpenAI were truly trying to create beings and not tools, then I'd feel differently.
It's kinda nuanced, but a being can voluntarily determine whether or not something is copyright infringing, understand why that might be an issue, and then decide whether or not to continue writing based on that. A tool can't really do that. You can try and add filters to a tool to avoid writing copy written text, but that will have flaws and holes in it. A being who understands what it's writing and what makes it plagiarism vs reference vs homage/inspiration/whatever is less likely to have those issues.
It's all federated, so it would be strange the bots didn't scrape anything off.