My original, editorialized title: Ars Technica Sells Out
Linking to this because I know people here read Ars Technica, and I totally didn’t become a subscriber three days before this was announced. Nope. No sir.
This is the logical endpoint for all the people who were complaining that scraping the open web for training is somehow immoral/illegal. Instead of stopping AI those with deep pockets will continue to train on everything while open source and small company efforts will be locked out.
Useful AI will be focused and narrow unless they actually achieve AGI.
Scraping literally the whole internet for inspiration is part of the reason they come up with utter rubbish. No one’s actually scrutinizing what their ingesting. It’s not so much a problem that they violate copyright it’s more an issue that because they do it in this manner their output is garbage.
If these AI companies actually did some content curation we might get decent AI out of it.
