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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

#161

Post by autoexec »

capital_guy wrote: post #109
autoexec wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If someone takes a picture of me while I'm in public that picture is their copyrighted work and they have every right to post that on the internet. There is no expectation of privacy in public, and Americans have very few rights against other people using photos/video of them (there are some exceptions for things like making someone into your company's spokesperson against their will)

If someone took a photo of my copyrighted work, their photo becomes their copyrighted work. They also have a right to post that picture on the internet without my consent. Every single person who takes a picture of a painting in a museum and posts it to social media is not a criminal. There are legal limitations there too however and that's fine because we have an entire legal system created to deal with that which didn't go away when AI was created.

If a company uses AI to create something that under the law violates your copyright you can still sue them.

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

#162

Post by pvaldes »

samatman wrote: post #136
capital_guy wrote: post #109

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. 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.

What AI does is much more like the Old Masters approach of going to a museum and painting a copy of a painting by some master whose technique they wish to learn. This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Or borrowing a thick stack of books from the library, reading them, and using that knowledge as the basis for fiction. That's a transformative work, and those are fine as well. My take is that training AI mode…

> This has always been both legal, and encouraged.

Not always. The copy must be easily identifiable as copy. An exact reproduction can't have the same dimensions as the original for example.

Drawing just a person or a detail of the picture, or redoing the picture in a different context or style, is encouraged.

Selling a full scale photo of the picture is forbidden. The copyright of famous art belongs to the museum.

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

#163

Post by solardev »

randomdata wrote: post #160
solardev wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You very well might! No algorithm is perfect, and no moderation system will get it right every time. But I hope your experience on HN is still a net positive.

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

#164

Post by glenstein »

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.

Right, the training isn't just reproducing the content, it's training on it to derive underlying themes for language and communication. And it can then effectively use those capabilities in dynamic ways.

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

#165

Post by panarky »

trimbo wrote: post #131
autoexec wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Until now, this has been an acceptable tradeoff because there's some friction to theft. Directly cloning the work is easy, but that also means an artist can sue or DMCA. It also means the original artist's work can go more viral, which, despite the short-term downsides, can help their p…

"That's just how the internet works" is nonsensical when AI is changing how the internet works.

Just because the tradeoffs of sharing on the internet used to work before AI, doesn't mean those tradeoffs continue to be workable after AI.

It's like having drones follow everyone around and publish realtime telephoto video of them because they have "no expectation of privacy" in public places.

Maybe before surveillance tech existed, there was no expectation of privacy in public places, but now that surveillance tech exists, people naturally expect that high-res video of their every move won't be collected, archived and published even if they are in public.

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

#166

Post by SoftTalker »

solardev wrote: post #142
marcosdumay wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it does. But that doesn't invalidate the GP.

It just makes it less likely that these normal people will be able to see the other normal posts from other normal people. Early Facebook's Wall was like that, mostly just friends chatting with each other about cats and babies, but then the company purposely started to optimize the timeline for controversy instead and it all went downhill. It's not that there aren't normal people on there, it's that organic feel-good…

I mean technically they were optimizing for "engagement" but it turns out that things that get strong reactions from people tend to be controversy and rage-bait.

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

#167

Post by glenstein »

dougb5 wrote: post #97
derefr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you get from the self-supervised training of a base model is more like "language fluency plus a web of crystallized-knowledge relationships." But also, ML model training is a bit like the stock market: the noise/stupidity in individual examples points in a bunch of random directions, and so ends up cancelling out; while the signal all points in the same direction, and so ends up captured in the distilled model.…

People are frequently wrong in the same way in environments where they are easily influenced by each other like social media. That's part of why these models, especially early on, exhibited so many racial and gender biases.

A great point, and a real problem, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the models inherit those problems while also simultaneously inheriting all kinds of useful knowledge about information and how to communicate effectively and dynamically with that information. It coexists with the benefit rather than serving as a defeater of the idea that there's any benefit.

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

#168

Post by autoexec »

wpietri wrote: post #134
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…

Yes, if one over-narrowly construes any analogy, it can be quickly dismissed. I suppose that's my fault for putting an analogy on the internet. We've had copying technologies since people invented the pen. It was such an important activity that there were people who spent their whole lives copying texts. With the rise of the printing press, copying became a significant societal concern, one so big that America's foun…

I don't think that facebook should be allowed to violate copyright law, but clearly they have the same rights as you do to copy works made publicly avilable on the internet.

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

#169

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

And it's not just human moderation (which would be biased based on the moderator) but things like the flamewar detector which actively demotes content that is getting a lot of quick responses. This is precisely what Facebook would promote, and HN might also if they were dependent on ad revenue to fund the service.

Much of what's bad about Facebook and other social media pretty much boils down to their need to show as many ads to as many eyeballs as possible.

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

#170

Post by randomdata »

solardev wrote: post #163
randomdata wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You very well might! No algorithm is perfect, and no moderation system will get it right every time. But I hope your experience on HN is still a net positive.

> no moderation system will get it right every time.

It doesn't need to, of course. Moderation, outside of blatant spam perhaps, is rather pointless. If someone wants to exclaim "Next.js is the second coming of Jesus", I want to hear it. There is a reason they are saying it.

To not get stuck in my bias: For those interested in people, why wouldn't you want to hear "so and so group of people are all _____ and they should all be ________, and oh, your mom sucks"? It is a ridiculous statement at face value, admittedly, but it is someone's attempt at communicating. What they are actually trying to say might teach you something important. Wouldn't you want to surface what they are truly trying to get at?

I certainly would for its tech-based counterpart. Especially if it seems to contradict what I hold dear.

> But I hope your experience on HN is still a net positive.

Naturally! I'm out of here the second it is in any way not positive. No sense wasting your free time on something you don't enjoy.

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