this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Have you read the ToS of your favourite social media site lately?
In any event, it might well be that companies (and you yourself) have the rights to use existing published media to train AIs. Copyright doesn't cover the analysis of public data. I suspect that people wouldn't like it if copyright got extended to let IP owners prohibit you from learning from their stuff.
You mean before or after all the sites updated their ToS it so that they were legally in the clear to sell user posts to AI training companies? Implying that they weren't before? Also, are we exclusively talking about cases where sites gave consent to provide data? Rather than just having it be harvested without their knowledge or consent?
And in any case, you're missing the key point, which is that legality doesn't matter in either case. You can't fight a megacorporation just doing whatever they please unless you happen to have an army of lawyers lying around. Most consumers don't.
Learning from things is a very obviously a completely different process to feeding data into a server farm.
Quite why proponents of AI-generated media still think this argument holds any water after 2 minutes of thought, let alone after almost a full year to consider it, is beyond me.
Being more specific is not the same as changing something from illegal to legal.
the update to the legal contract they have you agree to was in no way legally motivated?
CYA is not necessarily the same as changing the substance.
LLMs were a big paradigm shift. They're not necessarily something that could've been imagined when writing the original TOSs
why would they need to cover themselves against the scenario you're arguing they were already covering themselves against?
or when agreeing to them, which is literally the problem here
you can't meaningfully consent to every arbitrary hypothetical future scenario
The ToSes would generally have a blanket permission in them to license the data to third-party companies and whatnot. I went back through historical Reddit ToS versions a little while back and that was in there from the start.
Also in there was a clause allowing them to update their ToS, so even if the blanket permission wasn't there then it is now and you agreed to that too.
It is not very obviously different, as evidenced by the fact that it's still being argued. There are some legal cases before the courts that will clarify this in various jurisdictions but I'm not expecting them to rule against analysis of public data.
you know that a company putting a thing in their terms of service doesn't make it legally binding, right?
hence why they all suddenly felt the need to update their terms of services
people continuing to use a bad argument doesn't make it a good one
tell me you haven't followed anything about this conversation without telling me you haven't followed anything about this conversation
And you know that doesn't necessarily imply the reverse? Granting a site a license to use the stuff you post there is a pretty basic and reasonable thing to agree to in exchange for them letting you post stuff there in the first place.
As others have been pointing out to you in this thread, that also is not a sign that the previous ToS didn't cover this. They're just being clearer about what they can do.
Go ahead and refrain from using their services if you don't agree to the terms under which they're offering those services. Nobody's forcing you.
companies don't update legal documents for fun
you're also continuing to pointedly ignore what this conversation is actually about, so i'm guessing you don't really have anything relevant to say in response