this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 154 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Cool so we can just make up our own rules now. Well, all Microsoft products are freeware now because the same reason this guy

[–] [email protected] 80 points 4 months ago

Windows XP code was leaked 2 years ago, so it's freeware according to this idi... stable genius .

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Ok.. so from now on .. when I see a "repackaged" Microsoft product that for some reason.. which I don't care to know... doesn't ask for a payment.. I can use it without restrictions ?!! that's really nice of you Microsoft ... thank you.

[–] [email protected] 119 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

You heard it here folks. Microsoft says if you find something online, it's free.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Which is why I boycott as hard as I can every service this evil corporation provides (migrate your MS GitHub project away now so I can delete this account too)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Microsoft is in a death spiral.

Even my coworkers who are complete idiots with technology, who actively sabotage themselves every time they touch any piece of hardware and software, have soured entirely on nearly every Microsoft product across the board.

Its funny how quickly people change their minds when they dont understand the technology on a deeper level. Its just: "this is frustrating now I hate it" and no further thought.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

@JCreazy @sabreW4K3 I have found a key for windows 11 together with its source code that means that its free now right? :ablobcatreach:

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Always was.

[–] [email protected] 110 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Fair, then everything I can find on the Internet must be freeware too. Set the sails, matey!

[–] [email protected] 67 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

No officer, this is not a pirated movie. It's generated by an AI model I created and trained with data from the internet and the fact that it's 99% identical to an existing movie is irrelevant.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago

my AI is so good, it generated one that’s 100% identical

plus my AI uses less than 99% of the electricity of Microsoft’s

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can I just call lossy compression AI and use this as a defense?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

It is an algorithm... So yes.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Also, this ground breaking AI model I made to do this was umm accidentally erased and I also forgot how to do make it.

Jury: “seems reasonable”

[–] [email protected] 86 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As one person on Mastodon said, "AI is a toxic industry created by toxic people with toxic ideals".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I wouldn't go that far. As it turns out AI is a buzz word and buzz words have little meaning

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

Yea I thought about that too. But apparently some people find "AI" useful.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If an LLM can save me 30 minutes writing nice emails and responses and help me brainstorm, debug, or elucidate my thoughts then it is very useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

You really put 30 minutes of your own time above all of downsides this has for the rest of us who don't have a use for it (most of the world)?

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 4 months ago

It's freeware until someone else take m$ content without paying them, then it's copyright infringement.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago (2 children)

From the article:

Also, in 2022, several unidentified developers sued OpenAI and GitHub based on claims that the organizations used publicly posted programming code to train generative models in violation of software licensing terms

They can argue about it not being a copy all they want. If there is a single GPL licenced line of code scraped then anything they produce is a derivative work & must be licenced GPL.

nice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I’ll play the uniformed devils advocate here:

  1. Is the GPL license enforceable?
  2. And if so, I assume “derivative” will still subjective to some degree. Where do we draw the line between derivative and non-derivative?

I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.

They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

1: yes

2: Normally derivative works are patched or modified versions of the original. I think the common English meaning would apply & chatGPT et al are fucked. I doubt there is a precedent for this yet.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don't know, I haven't studied it in detail)

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago

So Windows XP source code leak is now freeware?

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago

I look forward to the lawsuits that will ultimately cost this man his job.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (2 children)

He seems to be confusing "freeware", which is basically a license for copyrighted work, with "public domain", which is the absence of a copyright.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, but anything you create automatically has a copyright, so for example this comment is not in the public domain. Its use is limited to the context I am using it in; that is, I expect it to be copied for federation purposes, but I wouldn't say that AI is covered in this context, just genuine readership, moderation, and bots that are 'part of the community'.

At least that's the EU stance afaik. Like if I saw this comment on a billboard somewhere I'd see that as a clear breach of copyright and even privacy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Thats a great way to put it in a simple way: its wrong to use other peoples content for things they did not expect they would be.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Well, it's one thing to say an 'artificial agent' looks at someone's work on deviant art and learns from it. It's another to use that to make money, as I personally can't imagine many of the posters would have been on board with that.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Wow the head of AI for MS doesn’t know what the word freeware means.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

The definition is being changed by Microsoft

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm fine with that, but let's put some rules against this.

  • Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
  • There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

What you're asking for is literally impossible.

A neural network is basically nothing more than a set of weights. If one word makes a weight go up by 0.0001 and then another word makes it go down by 0.0001, and you do that billions of times for billions of weights, how do you determine what in the data created those weights? Every single thing that's in the training data had some kind of effect on everything else.

It's like combining billions of buckets of water together in a pool and then taking out 1 cup from that and trying to figure out which buckets contributed to that cup. It doesn't make any sense.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it's definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Sorry, I misinterpreted what you meant. You said "any AI models" so I thought you were talking about the model itself should somehow know where the data came from. Obviously the companies training the models can catalog their data sources.

But besides that, if you work on AI you should know better than anyone that removing training data is counter to the goal of fixing overfitting. You need more data to make the model more generalized. All you'd be doing is making it more likely to reproduce existing material because it has less to work off of. That's worse for everyone.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It’s not impossible lol. All a company would need to do is keep track of where they were getting content. If I use a script to download as much of the internet as possible and end up with a bunch of copyrighted content I could still get in trouble, hell there was even a guy arrested for downloading jstor without authorization.. Stop letting these guys get away with crimes just because you like the idea of the end product

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago

Sure thing...now GPL/Creative Commons all your code involved in any way for your models, documentation, parameters, data sets, and allow full unlimited integration and modification by any parties to any portion of it.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago

Man it's crazy how these fuckers basically get to ignore copyright law whenever it's inconvenient to them but if you have one too many Windows machines provisioned they'll send the Spanish Inquisition after you.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

The social contract? Tf. The social contract still required attribution in almost all cases for creative work unless explicitlf stated otherwise—especially in the case of comercial products like ChatGPT—so I don’t know where this joker is getting his ideas.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

I'd like to see this "CEO of AI" stand on the same ground as the CEO of Sex

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Friends don't let Friends use Microsoft products. If you're using Windows you're finding this awful organisation. Shame on you.

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