Yeah! I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay for the ingredients, so I should be allowed to steal them. How else can I make money??
Alternatively:
OpenAI is no different from pirate streaming sites in this regard (loosely: streaming sites are way more useful to humanity). If OpenAI gets a pass, so should every site that’s been shut down for piracy.
If OpenAI wants a pass, then just like how piracy services make content freely open and available, they should make their models open.
Give me the weights, publish your datasets, slap on a permissive license.
If you’re not willing to contribute back to society with what you used from it, then you shouldn’t exist within society until you do so.
Generative AI is not going back into the bag. If not OpenAI, then someone else will control it. So we deal with them the next best way, force them to serve us, the people.
Piracy steals from the rich and gives to the poor. ChatGPT steals from the rich and the poor and keeps for itself.
and keeps for itself.
Which is why they should be legally compelled to publicize all of their datasets, models, research, and share any profits they’ve made with the works they can get provenance data for, because otherwise, it’s an unfair use of the public sphere of content.
One could very easily argue that adblockers are piracy, and those would be stealing from every social media creator, small blog, and independent news site, but I don’t see many people arguing against that, even though that very well includes people who aren’t wealthy corporations.
The issue isn’t necessarily the use of the copyrighted content, it’s the unfair legal stance taken on who can use the content, and how they are allowed to profit (or not profit) from it.
I’m not saying there are no downsides, but I do feel like a simple black and white dichotomy doesn’t properly outline how piracy and generative AI training are relatively similar in terms of who they steal from, and it’s more of a matter of what is done with the content after it is taken that truly matters most.
K, so Google should be shut down too?
They can’t operate without scraping copyrighted data.
Google (and search engines in general) is at least providing a service by indexing and making discoverable the websites they crawl. OpenAI is is just hoovering up the data and providing nothing in return. Socializing the cost, privatizing the profits.
Uh, that’s objectively false.
OoenAI also provides ChatGPT as a “free” service, and Google has made billions off of that “free” service they oh so altruistically provide you.
This is a false equivalency.
Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.
Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.
It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.
This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:
“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”
These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.
Maybe they should have considered that, before stealing data in the counts of billions
Google did it and everyone just accepted it. Oh maybe my website will get a few pennies in ad revenue if someone clicks the link that Google got by copying all my content. Meanwhile Google makes billions by taking those pennies in ad revenue from every single webpage on the entire Internet.
Then it sounds like your business is a failure and should be shutdown.
WHO is the one guy who downvotes you???
“NO! UNPROFITABLE BUSINESSES DESERVE TO THRIVE!!! MUST FEED THE BILLIONAIRES!!!”
Maybe OpenAI learned to downvote…
Lol how about every pirate who fundamentally opposes the copyright system?
How about everyone who uses Google and doesn’t want to see it shut down for scraping copyrighted content to provide a search engine?
Seriously, explain to me what’s different at a fundamental level about OpenAI scraping the web and transforming the data through an LLM and Google scraping the web and transforming the data through their algorithms (which include LLMs)?
Google (used to) scrapes the specific details authorized by robots.txt and uses it to make your content visible.
OpenAI scrapes everything it can technically see, ignoring robots.txt and feeds i to a black box and regurgitates it claiming it’s something new, that it deserves to be paid for.
Quite different actually.
Web search used to be about scraping the web to find and present other people’s work as just that… their work. Now the handful of websites claim ownership of the contributions of everyone, and at this point it’s just corporations arguing about who owns your stuff. Pirates will not win out in this argument, except maybe in the very short term.
I dont see why why being downvoted you make some very good points.
Id actually like to see google shut down on copyright grounds. The innovation of necessity would drive foss search alternatives that just ignore said restrictions and most likly we would end up with a better product.
I’ve seen threads where every single comment, no matter how anodyne, has 1 downvote. Don’t bother yourself over it. That way lies madness.
anodyne
anodyne /ăn′ə-dīn″/ adjective
- Capable of soothing or eliminating pain.
- Relaxing. “anodyne novels about country life.”
- Serving to assuage pain; soothing.
tanks fer noo werd dae fren
I always figure it’s someone whose life has become so pathetic, they bitterly downvote every single comment to try feel some control. And as a result, they feel like the Phantom of the Socials. Alone, but the true master of the place.
“Everyone must wonder, ‘Who keeps downvoting us?’ It is I! The true Master of Lemmy and- No, mother!.. Yes, mother!.. I tried but nobody wants to talk to me!.. I don’t want to!.. Yeah, she’s cute!.. I don’t want you to do that!.. Mother put the phone down!”
I’m unclear on context. Are you saying Mbin users can see who upvotes/downvotes?
Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.
Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they’re the reason you were able to show the ads to people.
Case law has been established in the prevention of actual image and text copyright infringement with Google specifically. Your point is not at all ambiguous. The distinction between a search engine and content theft has been made. Search engines can exist for a number of reasons but one of those criteria is obeisance of copyright law.
I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.
What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy “everything portals”.
Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they’re now more like their original competitors than their original successful self … but that’s a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.
The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn’t just about “stealing” content, it’s about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.
I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.
Sounds like an argument slave owners would use. “My plantation can’t make money without free labor!”
Copying information is not the same thing as stealing, let alone forcing people into slavery.
appreciate the important reality check, but I think the parent was just highlighting the absurdity of the original argument with hyperbole.
people are in jail for doing exactly what this company is doing. either enforce the laws equally (!) or change them (whatever that means in late stage capitalism).
Let’s advocate for no one going to prison for scraping information then. Let’s pick the second one where we don’t put more people into prison.
How do you think slave owners got bailouts after the 13th amendment was passed and the slaves got freed?
They used that part of the 13th that said “Well, except prisoners, those can be slaves.” Local law enforcement rounded up former slaves on trumped up charges and leased them back to the same plantation owners they were freed from. Only now if they escaped they were “escaped criminals” and they could count on even northern law enforcement returning them. The US is still a pro-slavery country and will be as long as that part of the 13th amendment stands.
“My private prison can’t make money without more overconvicted inmates!”
