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Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

abc.net.au

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Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#101

Post by pjs_ »

SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Funny to think that the distillation of 16 years of Facebook posts is now considered "intelligence."

There's a fun retrospective PoV which is that Silicon Valley has been through a sequence of consecutive hype waves, each of which has been viewed with derision as mega-scale fraud or brainrot:

- Video games (epic waste of time and moral debasement) gave us GPUs and NVIDIA

- Social media (rage bait-fueled argument machine and cat pic repository) gave us a huge corpus of text on which to train language models. Yes scientific papers and Wikipedia are necessary but probably not sufficient?

- Crypto (fraud, giant waste of resources) gave us a generation of young people who were comfortable building ludicrously oversized GPU clusters, and to some extent funded NVIDIA and TSMC R&D

all of which led to where we are with AI, which is that it is making (in my humble opinion) impressive dents in the problem of solving intelligence -- cue HN commenters telling me that AI is a giant fraud and waste of resources also :)

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#102

Post by solardev »

trimbo wrote: post #59
mattcantstop wrote: post #16

I am very likely in the minority here, but I think AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere. I'd be disappointed if it wasn't trained on everything they had access to. If it is trained on private information, then I would have issue with it.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

Well, just as another perspective...

I'm not convinced that the philosophy of copyright is a net positive for society. From a certain perspective, all art is theft, and all creativity builds upon preexisting social influences. That's how genres develop, periods, styles... and yes, blatant ripoffs and copycats too.

If the underlying goal is to be able to feed creators, maybe society needs better funding models...? The current one isn't great anyway, with 99% of artists starving and 1% of them becoming billionaires.

I'd much prefer something more like the model we have for some open-source projects, where an employer (or other sponsors) pays the living wage for the creator, but the resulting work is then reusable by all. Many works of the federal government are similarly funded, where a government employee is paid by your taxes but their resulting work automatically goes into the public domain without copyright.

I don't buy the argument that nobody would make things if they weren't copyrightable/paid directly. Wikipedia, OSM, etc. are all living proof that many people will volunteer their time to produce creative things without any hope of ever getting paid. As a frequent contributor to those and also open-source code, Creative Commons photography, etc., a large part of the joy for me is seeing how my work gets reused, transformed, and sometimes stolen by others (credit is always nice, but even when they don't mention me, at least I know the work I'm doing is useful to people).

But the difference for me is that I don't rely on those works to put food on the table. I have a day job and can afford to produce those works in my spare time.

I wish all would-be creators would have such a luxury, either via an employer relationship or perhaps art grants and the such. I wonder how other societies handle this... back in the day, I guess there were rich patrons, while some communities sponsor their artists for communal benefit. Not sure what works best, but copyright doesn't have to be the only way society could see creative outputs.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#103

Post by wpietri »

autoexec wrote: post #76
trimbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

> but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. > I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements. Ultimatel…

> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied.

You could make the same argument about paper. "That's just how photocopiers work! If you don't want your creations to be endlessly duplicated and sold, don't write them down!" Heck, you could make the same argument about leaving the house. "That's just how guns work! Don't go out in public if you don't want to take the risk of getting shot!"

But it's a bad argument every time. That something is technically possible doesn't make it morally right. It's true that a big point of technology is to increase an individual's power. But I'd say that increased power doesn't diminish our responsibility for our actions. It increases it.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#104

Post by pbhjpbhj »

vasco wrote: post #95
guerrilla wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. Or we could be ethical and encourage others to be ethical.

I see you're one of the ones that wouldn't download a car.

I would share a car I had rights to, and download a car made free to me. Facebook would certainly sue me if it were their car, they should thus be held to that standard in my personal opinion.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#105

Post by schmorptron »

vasco wrote: post #95
guerrilla wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. Or we could be ethical and encourage others to be ethical.

I see you're one of the ones that wouldn't download a car.

We could make a distinction between individuals and companies doing it

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#106

Post by randomdata »

solardev wrote: post #71
doublepg23 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t consider HN social media?

I guess it's a gray area? It's more like a forum to me, of the pre-Facebook sort, more like Slashdot than reddit. And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it. We end up with a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop and sometimes complaining about the job market, but that's still far less ragebaitey than most socia…

> It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it [...] a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop

Something doesn't add up here. Nerds talking shop and controversy and vitriol about the their technical preferences is the same thing.

Perhaps what you're saying is that controversy and vitriol is only apparent when you're an "innocent bystander" who doesn't have a passion for the subject? Which HN avoids by usually remaining focused on a fairly narrow set of subjects, to a user base generally passionate towards those subjects, so you don't notice?

That is an astute observation, if that is what you're trying to say. Indeed, if you showed your non-technical grandmother HN, she would no doubt see it the way Facebook was talked about earlier.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#107

Post by marcosdumay »

Ukv wrote: post #99
trimbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

> Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it and there's a level of deniability? Generally I don't think people are arguing that copyright law should be more lenient to AI than it is to humans. If your work gets ripped off (a substantially similar copy not covered by fair use) you can sue regardless of tools used in its creation. Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should b…

> Question would be whether machine learning, unlike human learning, should be treated as copyright infringement.

No, the question is whether those genAI we have around are mass copyrights violation machines or whether they "learn" and build non-violating work.

And honestly, I have seen evidence pointing both ways. But the "copyrights protection" institutions are all quickly to decide the point dismissing any evidence on philosophical basis.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#109

Post by capital_guy »

autoexec wrote: post #76
trimbo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

> but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. > I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements. Ultimatel…

> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied.

And if someone takes a picture of your artwork, or takes a picture of your person, and posts that to the internet without your consent? Have you given up your rights then?

My answer: Absolutely not.

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