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as a heavy Napster user in the nineties, I find this all quite baffling

Late state capitalism is so much more crime and felonies than I thought it would be.

always about paying for labor. Uber could have had decent wages. Amazon could have safe and humane working conditions. labor. always.

Yep, NVIDIA has a group dedicated to getting around YouTube (and others’) download protections to train various models.

All the US ruling class is good at is exploiting labor and stealing from creatives and other workers. It should be no surprise that they made machines just like themselves.

Can share post please

And even then they go and shred rare books.

Like insurance companies covering preexisting conditions, paying authors and artists for their work is something A.I. companies will need to be *legislated* into doing. And that *still* won't make it art; or right.

I don’t use the western AI, DeepSeek doesn’t track or algorithm my searches. Doesn’t even save my previous searches.

They steal all the things then claim no responsibility or accountability...because machine did it. bsky.app/profile/c0nc...

That would’ve been kind of fun because their language would skew to past eras. A chatbot that sounds slightly Victorian would rock.

📌

but the ephemeral unreal dream scenes are the thing that made early AI graphics interesting! Because you had to put some effort into thinking what you're seeing. There's just no point to me to use the newer AI generations because it's just the most generic averaged out things.

KNOWING it broke copyright laws. We have receipts from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to my knowledge.

Apertus is another one where the training dataset is legally unencumbered, but yeah, there still aren't many examples...

Regardless of what it uses, I'm afraid of how dangerous it will be in the wrong hands once it reaches its full potential. Video evidence will not mean anything anymore, leading to its inevitable use for blame-shifting and more organized crime where judgement is made from where the money is. 🙁

Similarly, we should not let AI companies further enclose the public domain in the same way publishers did upon the invention of the press.

The same way they loosed their hacking bots on the Internet at large.

I'm afraid I disagree at a basic level. I can do exactly that (and basically have when a young child) and it is considered my writing. Horrible writing, with obvious influence and borrowing of concepts, but not criminal or theft.

If it is just the illegally obtained part, then yes, I completely agree. But thinking in terms of all the AI art generators that are out there, trained on images from the web that anyone can see, how is that different than a person painting something after seeing all those same images?

I don’t think you’re actually trying to find answers.

You can say “okay but what if they did get a licensed copy that included all the uses.” But that’s a counter factual and Scalzi specifically pointed out that they didn’t do it.

Pretty easily, actually. The law is generally much more pragmatic and much less formalistic than many people think.

No, fuck it, it's simpler than that. If you booked Taylor Swift to play at your birthday party, and what showed up was a cardboard cutout of Taylor Swift and a portable CD player, would you think that was $4.2M well spent? Why not - looks like her, sounds like her.

I agree it would be difficult, but I don't consider using some words in the same order is necessarily plagiarism. After all, many people have written stories about southern hospitality and used "Bless her heart!" without it being plagiarism.

A potential defense for LLMs is fair use, and they have in fact claimed that the way LLMs work means that an exact copy of the works in question are not actually resident in the dataset. At least one court has accepted that; at least one has not.

Fundamentally, the two processes are in no way similar, and calling them both “learning” is obscuring that fact

This feels akin to asking why people are entitled to human rights but laptops aren't. (it's because the laptops aren't human beings)

How is an LLM different from a person?

If I program a robot to create a car using patented material, I am legally liable; patents specifically prohibit this to give the patent-holder time to profit from their invention. If I program a computer to create a book using copyrighted material, I am legally liable, for the same reason.

im swooping in here to say the person you're talking to is likely not going to listen to you, even if you're correct, which you are. they're parroting all the AI bro talking points which has become akin to religious beliefs. you cant logic someone out of something they didnt logic themselves into.

It would, frankly, demand action that would make John brown's abolitionist work look like a polite request.

The fact that all the theft is only part of a ‘top 5 reasons it’s awful and should be shut down’ makes it pretty embarrassing for all these companies to be shoehorning it into their services. Learned a lot about how little shame even smaller businesses have in the last couple years.

AI dataset for training Large Language Models composed purely of public domain content at Common Corpus? huggingface.co/blog/Pclangl...

Underrated skeet.

Someone suggested "Grand Theft Autocorrect".

What if all AI "art" was generated based on public domain or stuff like photos of trees, clouds or mountains, without stealing anything, and then released commercially - would that be okay?

Intellectual property theft, chatbot sycophancy, on and on... The real danger of AI lies in its ability to make disastrous decisions based on incomplete, incorrect, or irrelevant information 10 billion times faster than humans can.

Which, of course, should mean that it legally cannot be commercialized. Alas...

Are AI executives begging for immunity from damage they created? Is the sudden concern about "humanity" a smokescreen for a technology with a 95% failure rate? Have AI executives been making knowingly false promises for years (i.e. fraud)? What do you think? www.thedataexperts.us/writing/ente...

There's a special pain that a month after losing their suit to the Author's Guild and paying a multi-million settlement, Meta stole one of my novels then found a more agreeable judge for that suit.

I'm increasingly a Luddite. This is a pernicious technology that cannot be used without harm. Even if magically made environmentally friendly, every piece of your own cognition you give over to "AI" is a piece lost to you. You stop using it, and it atrophies. It's the true death of expertise.

This. I just do not want to contribute to the furthering of educational inequality that seems inevitable. I prefer (and my student population demands it, unlike at boostering institutions) to concentrate on more basic skill development to bring everyone to the best thinking they can muster.

(just to be clear, this analogy is in agreement with OP, the fences and drones and exclusive use licences have to some from somewhere and someone)

IP is all ego stroking

Not to mention if they did this deliberately with vetted sourcing and paid those responsible for adding GOOD info, they may not be so damn wonky.

among other things, it would use a *lot* less compute this way

“Better things aren’t possible, you fool” Get that a lot!

They would. They actually spend quite a bit on training data.

Damn, you are right, sounds like their business model isn't legally or financially sound.

They might understand it conceptually. They just don’t understand its purpose or value. It’s inefficient. Unwanted friction. And it forces you to consider other people!

the irony is that the extraction-based model has *delayed* profitability for frontier labs! OpenAI in particular will likely go out of business because of it! But capital is the proverbial scorpion on the proverbial frog.

So where the fuck are all the intellectual property lawyers? Oh, wait.....

How, exactly, do you sufficiently compensate creators for stealing their work to power a machine that burns their future careers and also the world, John?

We didn't have that shit the first time around! ... well, okay, there was Napster but...

You're not wrong, it's possible to go out and pay a licence for every piece of copyrighted text, that's probably 95% of currently available text. It would cost billions before you even made a single dollar, and then only governments and deranged billionaires could do it. Oh wait...

It doesn’t really function now! Every few weeks I have to ‘remind’ Meta’s AI to not classify my pet shelter’s FB page as Home and Garden. Which it does because “lots of our picture have grass in them.” Which is true, but they also have A FUCKING RESCUE DOG in them, too.

If I'm not allowed to steal my neighbor's car, I wouldn't be able to drive it! 🤡

#FuckAi bsky.app/profile/mc20...

Whoa wait are you questioning the staggering genius of folks who stole the entire world’s collective intellectual property and managed to turn that into a $42 BILLION dollar loss?

I wonder how an AI company would react if another AI company uses their source code to train its own AI.

THIS 👆 None of this was necessary. They did it because they could.

I don't see compensation as possible. The only solution would be something like the clandestine bargain between Unit 731 and the US: the "medical research" was obtained in exchange for amnesty. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in.

I would be really interested to read what @scott.hanselman.com thinks about all this.

Exactly. It's a snake eating its own tail

They'd have to be profitable first

"But if it was limited only to public domain it couldn't function like it does!" Exactly, the same way I'm not supposed to rob a bank. Otherwise it's a phenomenal business model, you just walk out with the money

And based on the experience of arguing with the Anthropic settlement it's not as easy to get compensation as you would think (every five minutes it seems you have to re-submit the materials).

We used to be governed by people that thought that if something was difficult, but virtuous, that made it more worth doing. Now, 'it's too hard' is the excuse. More than ever, the difficult process to achieve the best result must become the endeavor, and compensating artists is just the start. 😤

Capitalism sucks. The idea that artists need to sell their art to live comfortably also sucks.

I'm also very okay with the Supreme Court following long-established precedent and ordering not just the models wiped, but if I understand correctly, the machines used to store & run those models destroyed as well We have the solution 🤷‍♂️ Do we have the will?

it’s already losing billions and the reckoning of its leveraged debt will arrive soon. there is no money to license and compensate. which is why they never did it. leeches on society and antithetical to what makes life worth living

d) it DOESN'T function!

“If I hadn’t been able to raid the National Gallery for paintings, my living room wouldn’t have looked nearly as nice as it does now!”

The problem isn't the tech, the problem is the technocrats who chose to develop it unethically instead of ethically. Technology is neither good nor bad. Only people's choices and intentions are.

Breaking eggs is legal, as long as you own the eggs.

The way I've seen folks in the DoD space go on about it, it's almost tantamount to admitting they've been committing fraud for the previous 30 years of their careers. Just completely leaning into, "I'm incompetent and I expect everyone around me to be the same so we need AI or China is gonna win."

who was it that said they'd go out of business if they had to compensate everybody whose work they trained their model on, because both of those things should happen

Anthropic sure would’ve saved themselves a ton of money if they just bought the books instead of paying 3k each lol, let alone what the music industry is going to do to them

This is just another form of wage theft, one of the cornerstones of capitalism.

Yeah but it's gonna affect rich people :( We cannot be mean to rich people who hoard their wealth. /s