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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

den.dev

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Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#151

Post by IMSAI8080 »

dusted wrote: post #121

So this is a blog stating to be an owner and not a renter, and then proceeds to talk about how to rent hosting.. Sorry, but if it's not your hardware, on your property, then you're renting. Regulations have been waay too lose on, especially, american ISPs where I understand they are allowed to not only refuse you a public routable IP but also dictate what kind of traffic you're allowed to send and receive (for exampl…

I think the sentiment was to keep your content (and audience) portable, not specifically that you don't rely on anyone else's services. If you post everything on Twitter and Twitter decides they don't like you, then that's the end of you. If you host on a personal domain and your rented web host decides to block you, there's plenty more options and you can take your audience with you and they will never know the difference.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#152

Post by kelseydh »

immibis wrote: post #98
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

For images, there's Nightshade, which imperceptibly alters your images but makes them poison for AI (does anyone understand why?) I don't know if there's something similar for text. You could try writing nonsense with a color that doesn't contrast with the background. The evidence Nightshade works is that AI companies want to make it illegal.

Link to Nightshade: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

This is fascinating. Would be great to have a web interface artists can use that doesn't require them to install the software locally.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

friendzis wrote: post #123
baxtr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me viscerally agrees because large corporations have monetized UGC. Another part of me though thinks differently. We are a species that builds knowledge from generation to generation. From one person to another. Over years, over centuries. Philosophically this part tends to think that your thoughts and ideas belong to humanity and thus need to be shared with all of us.

If you recall high school history, rapid, exponential "progress" happened once the knowledge was 1) written down (printing press) 2) archived for the future (libraries) 3) systematized (textbook/encyclopaedia) 4) proactively shared (public education), all on a massive scale. The fact that some knowledge exists and is even accessible does not really matter if takes a highly trained in a very narrow field scholar to fi…

Now we have 5) aggregated and internalized as a whole by computational constructs such as LLMs, which are - 4) - proactively shared (open weights, but also freemium service and dirt-cheap API access to commercial SOTA models), still on a massive scale.

> There is undoubtedly a lot of useful knowledge on internet platforms, however, most of that knowledge remains unsystematized and largely undiscoverable, meaning that contribution to the totality of human knowledge by these platforms is infinitesimal, which is further drowned by cat and porn videos.

Precisely that. Which is why I often argue, that for 99%+ of the content in the training data, its marginal contribution to the training process - itself infinitesimal in isolation - is still by far the most value that content will ever bring to the world.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#155

Post by cxr »

rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

It'd be great if you folks would stop showing up and derailing the comments with threads like this.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#156

Post by pjc50 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #59
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I've reached the same conclusion. All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation…

> I really didn't expect to live in this "copyright for me, not for thee" world

Having been interested in copyright activism for two decades, that's exactly what I expected. Copyright is very much about power, and concentration of power.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

w4 wrote: post #83
Terr_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but lately I've had this quixotic daydream of a combination accept-cookies / agree-to-TOS page that comes up, and the Terms of Service says by proceeding they agree to give the site-owner an perpetual, irrevocable, and royalty-free to use and re-license any future content that they create using any generative AI that was trained using the website contents. Then you carefully log what LLM user-agents/IPs go pas…

This idea is reminiscent of the opening scene of Accelerando by Charlie Stross: Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?" "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials." … "Uh, I'm not sure…

Also amusing:

> patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists

This perfectly captures how both patent trolls and MAFIAA look like in my mind.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#158

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

chii wrote: post #139
entropi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet). I don't understand how that matters. I thought that the whole idea of copyright and licences was that the holder of the rights can decide what is ok to do with the content and what is not. If the ho…

> If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss? the holder of content does not automatically get to prescribe how i would use said content, as long as i comply with the copyrights. The holder does not get to dictate anything beyond that - for example, i can learn from the content. Or i can berate it. Copyright is not a right that covers every single conceivable us…

Copyright means the holder does automatically get to prescribe how content can be copied. That's literally the definition of copyright.

A typical copyright notice for a book says something like (to paraphrase...) "not to be stored, transmitted, or used by or on any electronic device without explicit permission."

That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is subsequently thrown away.

Any argument about this is trying to redefine copyright as the right to extract the semantic or cultural value of a document. In reality the definition is already clear - no copying of a document by any means for any purpose without explicit permission.

This is even implicitly acknowledged in the CC definitions. CC would be meaningless and pointless without it.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#159

Post by prmoustache »

bulatb wrote: post #74
CamperBob2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. So? What do I care? If some stuff I posted to my website (with no requirement for attribution or remuneration, and also no guarantee that the information is true or valid) can improve the AI services that I use, great.

Wouldn't you feel just a little bad if you worked really hard on something, gave it out for free in the spirit of sharing, and someone came along and said thanks, loser , and sold it for money? Would you want to go on making it for free for them to sell?

The ones who really lose are the one who buy their stuff while yours stays free.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#160

Post by namaria »

alibarber wrote: post #120
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up. I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' -…

I've argued years ago based on how LLMs are built that they would only ever amount to lossy and very memory inefficient compression algorithms. The whole 'hallucination' thing misses the mark. LLMs are not 'occasionally' wrong/hallucinating sometimes. They can only ever return lower resolution versions of what was on their training data. I was mocked then but I feel vindicated now.
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