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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

#151

Post by throwaway913242 »

ipaddr wrote: post #65
giobox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and in exchange users received rather a lot of services for free... photo and video storage etc as just one example, Llama is free to use, etc etc. While I've no sympathy for mishandling private user data as Meta has of course been guilty of in the past, I think users getting 16 years of free service in exchange for their public posts being used in this fashion is not that bad of a deal.

You get photo/video storage worth a fraction of a cent. Llama doesn't have a free to use service. People got 'free service' in exchange for putting ads around content not for this. It's a terrible deal no one asked the users if they want to agree to. It's visiting a website and saving an image and claiming the website owes you for storage.

Didn't the users explicitly agree to the deal when they made an account and clicked "I agree to the Terms of Use"? Sure there's a degree of "oh nobody reads those anyway" to it that society at large should be approaching more rigorously (maybe a common-contract type of system), but at the end of the day the users are choosing to interact with a service, upload their content to it, and explicitly WANTING their content to be shared (to their friends, on their feeds, etc).

The real question is whether the agreement that was made between them and their users during 2007-now covered uses like training AI, but most likely it was a very broad "we can use your data how we want" type of statement and that agreement wasn't fought (or fought hard enough?) back then.

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

#152

Post by guerrilla »

orthecreedence wrote: post #126
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.

We can encourage profit-driven megacorps to be ethical? Sure, by abolishing them. Otherwise, you're just screaming into the void.

I think what I said is a prerequisite for that. There will be no structural changes without widespread cultural changes.

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

#153

Post by Buttons840 »

autoexec wrote: post #139
Buttons840 wrote: post #111

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. This is true for average people. Is it true for the wealthy? Is it true for Disney? Does our law acknowledge this truth and ensure equal justice for all?

It's 100% true for everyone. You can't access anything at disney.com without making a copy of that thing. Disney can't access anything at yourdomain.whatever without making a copy of that thing. Whatever crimes either of you can get away with using your copies is another matter entirely. Any rights you had under the legal system you had before AI haven't gone away, neither have the disadvantages you have against the…

One of the comments you replied to was complaining that their work would be copied and used in training LLMs or other lucrative algorithms, and then you responded taking about how it's common to temporarily copy data into RAM to show a web page. Those are very different, and bringing up such technical minutia is not helpful to the discussion.

If someone asks "how can I share my work online without it being copied?", "actually, you can't share it without people copying it into RAM" is not the answer they're looking for. That answer it too technical, too focused on minutia, and our laws recognize that.

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

#154

Post by autoexec »

ulbu wrote: post #135
autoexec wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!" No, the argument would be about photocopies, not paper. "That's just how photocopiers work! Don't put something into a photocopier if you don't want photocopies of it." It isn't possible for anyone to access anything on the internet without m…

> If that isn't what you want, don't publish your works there. "Women are oppressed in Iran. Well, that's just how Iran is. Just leave it if you don't want to be oppressed" Oh my. Yea, and whatever is some way, is that way – "it is how it is, deal with it". It's an empty statement. The topic is an ethical and political discussion in light of current technologies. It's a question of whether it should work this way. Th…

> "Women are oppressed in Iran. Well, that's just how Iran is. Just leave it if you don't want to be oppressed" Yea, and whatever is some way, is that way – "it is how it is, deal with it". It's an empty statement.

No, because Iran can stop oppressing women and still exist as a functional country. oppressing women today is "how it is". The internet on the other hand is designed to be a system for the distribution of copies. That isn't "how it is", but rather "what it is".

The internet cannot do anything except distribute copies and anything that doesn't distribute copies wouldn't be the internet.

> Sounds like you haven't heard of private messages.

Private messages are also not what is being discussed here. The comment being discussed said: "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."

"anything public". For what it's worth though, private messages are still copies.

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

#155

Post by romwell »

squigz wrote: post #49
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

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

It's... really not. Despite what some people seem to think, most of the 3 billion+ Facebook users are normal people who aren't just posting nonsense or memes.

>It's... really not. Despite what some people seem to think, most of the 3 billion+ Facebook users are normal people who aren't just posting nonsense or memes.

Most users also don't post much.

Most Facebook posts (as opposed to users) are nonsense and memes.

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

#156

Post by guerrilla »

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.

Depends on the risk assesment but I'd say I'm a lot more like Robin Hood. Facebook is obviously Prince John.

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

#157

Post by solardev »

randomdata wrote: post #150
solardev wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just the different degree of emotional attachment people to have to these topics. Yeah, people can get a bit worked up about how annoying JS development has become, but not quite to the same level as the major headlines of the day about the latest Middle East controversy/Soviet threat/identity politics thing. Oh, and my vacuum does suck just fine, thank you very much.

> not quite to the same level as the major headlines of the day about the latest Middle East controversy/Soviet threat/identity politics thing. Why do you say that? I share in the tech-minded proclivity towards not having much interest in people, so I admit to being largely out of the loop, but what is there to be worked up about where you wouldn't equally get worked up around some tech-based topic? It just sounds bo…

You, yourself, might just be different/lucky then :) Or you could just be typical here. The average HN user is probably not representative of the average person in the overall population. It's a self-selecting crowd of nerds, many of whom aren't all that interested in more worldly topics. (Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's part of the reason I'm here and not on mainstream social media.)

But out in the greater society, people get all worked up about those other topics, and will go protest in the streets, blockade representatives' houses, send death threats, rage endlessly online, attempt assassinations, go on shooting sprees, etc. Those things are usually triggered by some emotional attachment to some tribal identity and anger towards some out-group.

In a monoculture like this, we're mostly peers. Yeah, we might disagree about some particular things, but there's less of an "us vs them" mindset as you see politics, geopolitics, values-based communities, etc.

Discussions of technical merit, even when heated, thankfully don't reach those emotional heights quite as often. In my experience, at least...

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

#158

Post by Guvante »

jstummbillig wrote: post #147
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…

This benefits actually everyone. If our combined creative work until this point is what turns out to be necessary to kick-start a great shot at abundance (and if you do not believe that, if it's all for nothing, why care at all about the money wasted on models?) it might simply be our societal moral obligation to endorse it -- just as is will be the model creators moral obligation to uphold their end of this deal. In…

I want to see any indication that abundance form AI would benefit man kind first.

While I would love Star Trek society has been going very much towards Cyberpunk aesthetic aka "the rich hold all the power".

To be precise AI models fundamentally need content to survive but they need so much content there is no price that makes sense.

Allowing AI to monetize without enriching the people who allowed it to exist isn't a good path forward.

And to be clear I do not believe there is a fundamental rift here. Shorten copyright to something reasonable like 20 years and in a decade AI will have access to all of the data it needs guilt free.

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

#159

Post by mupuff1234 »

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 think the question is what is included in the "public sphere".

If I'm a Facebook user, I definitely don't see posts that I meant to share among friends as something that should be considered part of the public sphere.

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

#160

Post by randomdata »

solardev wrote: post #157
randomdata wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not quite to the same level as the major headlines of the day about the latest Middle East controversy/Soviet threat/identity politics thing. Why do you say that? I share in the tech-minded proclivity towards not having much interest in people, so I admit to being largely out of the loop, but what is there to be worked up about where you wouldn't equally get worked up around some tech-based topic? It just sounds bo…

You, yourself, might just be different/lucky then :) Or you could just be typical here. The average HN user is probably not representative of the average person in the overall population. It's a self-selecting crowd of nerds, many of whom aren't all that interested in more worldly topics. (Nothing wrong with that, mind you. It's part of the reason I'm here and not on mainstream social media.) But out in the greater s…

> But out in the greater society, people get all worked up about those other topics

I understand that. Believe me, I can definitely get worked up about Next.js, if you really want to go there...! It is in no way surprising that people interested in people can end up in the same place around topics related to people.

> In my experience, at least...

But the underscore here is that your experience is based on where your interests (perhaps not the perfect word to describe this, but it's what I got) lie. If you have a greater interest in people, you're going to feel more strongly about it. I'm not bothered by it at all.

But, by the same token, what is to say that I don't feel more strongly towards technical controversy than you do?

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