Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

abc.net.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 267 posts

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

#171

Post by autoexec »

Buttons840 wrote: post #153
autoexec wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?",…

The point is that "copies" was never the problem. "sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale" is the expected outcome of publishing something publicly on the internet.

Their problem was copyright infringement and like you said, our laws recognize that problem. We have an entire legal framework for dealing with companies that publish infringing copies of copyrighted works. None of that has changed with LLMs.

If a company publishes something that violates copyright law they can be sued for it, it shouldn't matter if an AI was involved in the creation of what was published or not.

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

#172

Post by consteval »

golergka wrote: post #12

If it's publicly posted, it literally means that everybody can read it. What's exactly the issue here?

Because simply having the right to view something doesn't mean you can do whatever the hell you want with it. People understand this generally, but for whatever reason this is something tech people really struggle with.

I can freely view a billboard on the highway. I can even take pictures of it and post them and say, "hey look at this funny billboard!" I can't, however, take the billboard design, make a shirt, and sell that shirt. I can't strip the billboard and use its materials to build a house. I can't set the billboard on fire to keep myself warm.

Because those are all different things that require their own permission, their own license. We haven't thought about this much for AI.

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

#173

Post by autoexec »

panarky wrote: post #165
trimbo wrote: post #131

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 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 t…

> 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.

currently, that'd be an unrealistic expectation. I'd agree that it would be nice if that wasn't the case but laws need to catch up with technology. Right now, AI doesn't change things too much since a company who publishes something that violates copyright law is still breaking the law. It shouldn't matter if an AI was used to create the infringing copy or not.

I'm all for new laws giving extra rights to people on top of what we already have if needed, but generally copyright law is already far too oppressive so I'd need to consider a specific proposed law and its impacts.

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

#174

Post by jofla_net »

panarky wrote: post #165
trimbo wrote: post #131

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 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 t…

Yup, this is just a new-age tragedy of the commons. As soon as armies of sheep come to graze, or consume your content, the honeymoon's over.

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

#175

Post by ziddoap »

datavirtue wrote: post #80
autoexec wrote: post #64

I don't believe for a moment that they haven't used the data of countless children. Especially early on when kids just had to click an "I'm over 18" button or enter a fake birthday to get accounts and facebook, like everyone else, just looked the other way.

The monsters!

Indeed, knowingly collecting and processing the data of children who cannot understand the implications nor consent to their data being used for commercial gain is monstrous.

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

#176

Post by squigz »

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.

> It's a terrible deal no one asked the users if they want to agree to.

Every single user of Facebook was asked and agreed to it. [0]

This was not unexpected. Anyone who read the ToS of most large tech companies in the past 10 years, and gave it more than a few seconds thought, would have realized that they were giving them access to use the data however they want - a fact many of us have been warning people about for many years.

LLMs have also been an expected evolution of technology for many years. Nobody should have been surprised about this.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/terms.php

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

#178

Post by ethbr1 »

ziddoap wrote: post #33
ethbr1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume that was one thing they were extremely diligent about ironing out, doing this at scale.

What is that assumption based on? There have been numerous scandals over the years regarding their lack of care when handling personally identifiable data. Meta is not who I look to for being extremely diligent with data.

Because open source, publically-released LLMs regurgitating specific user data is enough of a strategic risk to the entire effort that it would have been #1 on the test cases.

LLM training is also apple and oranges with regards to how they handle data in the course of normal processing.

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

#179

Post by grumbel »

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…

> then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale.

You don't need to train the AI on the work for that. You don't even need to show the AI the work itself. You can just give the AI a vague description of the work and it is able to replicate something very close to it.

That's something you can try today, hand Claude or ChatGPT an image, let them describe the image, put that description into your favorite image generator. The output is a clean-room-clone of the original. It won't be a photocopy, but it will contain all the significant features that made up the original, even with surprisingly short descriptions of just a 100 words.

Won't be long and you can hand the AI a movie trailer and the AI will build you the rest of the movie from it.

> Why would we embrace this now that a computer can do it

You can't stop it long term. That old "How To Draw an Owl"-meme is reality now. You give the AI some key points and it will fill in all the rest. The issue here isn't so much copyright, but that we'll be so flooded with content that it will be impossible for anybody to stand out. We might be heading towards the death of static content and heading into a world were everything is generated on the fly.

Post reply on HN