Could somebody explain why this is bad?
I’m not a fan of all this AI stuff.
But I can’t think of an argument besides “Big tech is bad and they should not make money if they use public information to do so.”
I’m genuinely curious. There may be massive amounts of data being processed. But only public data, right? If they can use that data for something, isn’t that something positive? Or at the very least nothing negative?
I always thought anything that is posted in public spaces means making it available for anyone to use anyway. So what am I missing here?
This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill
Not really, anyone can go and collect the same water they are collecting. And it’s happening, open source LLMs are quickly catching up and a shit ton of other companies are also crawling the exact same data.
“anyone”. I hate when people use this word knowing full well it’s not true in meaning. “Nothing is stopping you from spending millions of dollars on your own LLM.” Ok.
The web is a bunch of information that is public, sure. People don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy but they used to have a reasonable expectation that their information would be used in a very specific fashion. Especially in the US where there is a default copyright claim on data. And crawling the web may ignore text that states you can’t use the data. Even if you include a clause saying by accessing the data you agree to the claim. That only works against little people. The “anyone” that can’t actually just go and build a LLM.
Sure but that applies to literally a million other things. There is an absolute ton of shit that companies do that individuals can’t which is still built off of others.
A company can go spend 1B on a new state of the art nuclear reactor which will bring in billions over it’s life time. Will the physicist who discovered the underlying math see any of the profit? No, probably not. And if they do it won’t be nearly a “fair share”. Nor will all the publishers and authors who generated the learning materials that the people working for said company used to build it.
There is tons of public knowledge that can only be utilized with a huge investment, that’s just how a lot of innovation works.
And OpenAI also has a ton of competitors. Sure they have the lead for now but thousands of other companies are also scraping and building LLMs.
You’re not really going to win this argument as I’m an anti-capitalist. So I agree a lot of that stuff is wrong too. I don’t believe you should own other’s labor. The employees should own the company. And I don’t believe in copyright, but it does exist and it’s enforced against individuals, so it’s only fair it’s enforced against them as well. I don’t think you should be allowed to blindly scrape when information could be behind an agreement to use it in a specific manner if accessed. Plus I think it should be opt in based off it being a new use and therefore a new right of copyright. Just as suddenly actors need to worry if they’ll be scanned and owned by a Hollywood studio now. It’s something a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. And that’s why past works are protected from that use.
Things behind a third party privacy policy, sure. You agreed to it, whatever. But your own website? I’m not feeling it.
Could somebody explain why this is bad? I’m not a fan of all this AI stuff. But I can’t think of an argument besides “Big tech is bad and they should not make money if they use public information to do so.”
I’m genuinely curious. There may be massive amounts of data being processed. But only public data, right? If they can use that data for something, isn’t that something positive? Or at the very least nothing negative? I always thought anything that is posted in public spaces means making it available for anyone to use anyway. So what am I missing here?
If the results were also open and public, it’d be a different conversation.
This is more akin to rain water collection up-hill and selling it back to the people downhill. It’s privatization of a public resource.
Not really, anyone can go and collect the same water they are collecting. And it’s happening, open source LLMs are quickly catching up and a shit ton of other companies are also crawling the exact same data.
“anyone”. I hate when people use this word knowing full well it’s not true in meaning. “Nothing is stopping you from spending millions of dollars on your own LLM.” Ok.
The web is a bunch of information that is public, sure. People don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy but they used to have a reasonable expectation that their information would be used in a very specific fashion. Especially in the US where there is a default copyright claim on data. And crawling the web may ignore text that states you can’t use the data. Even if you include a clause saying by accessing the data you agree to the claim. That only works against little people. The “anyone” that can’t actually just go and build a LLM.
Sure but that applies to literally a million other things. There is an absolute ton of shit that companies do that individuals can’t which is still built off of others.
A company can go spend 1B on a new state of the art nuclear reactor which will bring in billions over it’s life time. Will the physicist who discovered the underlying math see any of the profit? No, probably not. And if they do it won’t be nearly a “fair share”. Nor will all the publishers and authors who generated the learning materials that the people working for said company used to build it.
There is tons of public knowledge that can only be utilized with a huge investment, that’s just how a lot of innovation works.
And OpenAI also has a ton of competitors. Sure they have the lead for now but thousands of other companies are also scraping and building LLMs.
You’re not really going to win this argument as I’m an anti-capitalist. So I agree a lot of that stuff is wrong too. I don’t believe you should own other’s labor. The employees should own the company. And I don’t believe in copyright, but it does exist and it’s enforced against individuals, so it’s only fair it’s enforced against them as well. I don’t think you should be allowed to blindly scrape when information could be behind an agreement to use it in a specific manner if accessed. Plus I think it should be opt in based off it being a new use and therefore a new right of copyright. Just as suddenly actors need to worry if they’ll be scanned and owned by a Hollywood studio now. It’s something a reasonable person wouldn’t expect. And that’s why past works are protected from that use.
Things behind a third party privacy policy, sure. You agreed to it, whatever. But your own website? I’m not feeling it.