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Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

reuters.com

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Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#121

Post by Melting_Harps »

flir wrote: post #50
Melting_Harps wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google having so many private photos in Google Photos must be a goldmine for them. While true, it's META who has won that arm's race long ago in my view; hell, they just disclosed that they have private access to DMs to Netflixh [0] in a lawsuit. If you don;t think they are training their own models on this data over all their platforms you have to be a complete idiot o: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp. That is a muc…

> Google is limited to mainly Android users https://www.appmysite.com/blog/android-vs-ios-mobile-operati... Random link. Can't vouch for it. But US and RoW have quite different patterns.

> Random link. Can't vouch for it

Seems about right to me, Android dominates the mobile World by sheer numbers.

But what is the value that they can derive from user data? A million Bangladeshi's texts from food delivery is probably a lot less valuable than say a Singaporean using Numbers on Mac OS to layout the next lucrative investment and the data they;d get from the correspondence of say 100 high net worth individuals hidden behind iOS (Pegasus MITM attack notwithstanding).

Again, the name of the game is to derive signal from noise from data, bulk collection is primitive when training models and often incredibly difficult to work around once it is in. I seriously think Gemini had this problem, along with QA/QC issues, rather it going from so-so Bard to total 'woke' Gemini. I may be wrong, but I think this is what happens when you go down the bulk collection and unfiltered/un-curated data route.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#122

Post by Melting_Harps »

wobbly_bush wrote: post #46
Melting_Harps wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google having so many private photos in Google Photos must be a goldmine for them. While true, it's META who has won that arm's race long ago in my view; hell, they just disclosed that they have private access to DMs to Netflixh [0] in a lawsuit. If you don;t think they are training their own models on this data over all their platforms you have to be a complete idiot o: Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp. That is a muc…

Whatsapp chats are encrypted, how can they be used to train the models? Also what kind of training can be done on Instagram data, is there anything of value there?

> Whatsapp chats are encrypted

While they claim E2E encryption, I seriously doubt they would offer this service entirely for free with having some backdoor or potential MITM breach that they likely tucked away in the ToS given the wide use of it it most of the World who pay for SMS/text messages: it just seems so incredibly unlikely to be entirely encrypted from a company that willing gave DMs to Netflix, used Cambridge Analytica etc... But even if it is encrypted, the meta data generated can tell you a lot too--as was the case with Pokemon GO--that may not directly benefit LLMs, but could help with creating dark patterns that make your AI companion (under the guise of an LLM) the 'must own' when deciding who to buy tokens/compute from.

Speculative for sure, but just look at the Twitter file leaks revealing how social media platforms willing work alongside intelligence agencies.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#123

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #72
Shrezzing wrote: post #18

>in talks with multiple tech companies to license Photobucket's 13 billion photos and videos >Photobucket declined to identify its prospective buyers, citing commercial confidentiality. >tech companies are also quietly paying for content locked behind paywalls and login screens, giving rise to a hidden trade in everything from chat logs to long forgotten personal photos from faded social media apps In this market, et…

I vividly remember consenting to all variety of terms agreements as a 13-year old on the web in 2007. I also remember explicitly licensing all of my output as CC and embracing copyleft. It's never been a secret that even captchas contribute to the improvement of models designed to ultimately sell ads to eyeballs. A lot of people just were not paying attention to the game being played, and so now they're getting playe…

When a company hides their skeevy practices in 30-page social media term consent form, I blame them a lot more than the normal person with limited time or the literal child. I’d prefer such people didn’t “get played” by multinational corporations, even if they potentially could have prevented it.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#124

Post by Scoundreller »

autoexec wrote: post #79
qeternity wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What harm has been inflicted upon you directly as a result?

That's the beauty of the system we have. Your data can be routinely used against you and you'll never be told about it. Your health insurance company can buy up records from a data broker that show you've been spending 6% more time at fast food restaurants compared to last year and they can use that to raise your rates, but they'll never tell you that was the reason, you'll just have a higher bill than before An empl…

The funny thing about insurance is that as it becomes perfect at assessing risk, it becomes worthless.

Oh, you’re about to have a $x claim this year, your premium is $x + y% admin fee.

Just self insure and save yourself the y%.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#125

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

qeternity wrote: post #58
bilbo0s wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's immediately and self-evidently obvious that no end-user in 2007 consented to photos of their 2007 era teenage self being used to train an AI how to identify an emo kid Unfortunately, they did actually. It's more accurate to say that they were presented a EULA and Terms of Service that no reasonable teenager would have had any hope of understanding. But since they're over 13, they're held to the terms of those ag…

People have known for eons that companies were using their data. TikTok is well publicized to be the CCP. And yet millions of people would rather have entertainment. There are plenty (myself included) who abstain, but the reality is the vast majority of people, if presented with free and unlimited dopamine hits, will gladly give away their info.

Do you consider such people to blame? Under your own framing, they’re more or less being taken advantage of by a modern form of drug dealer.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#126

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

Terr_ wrote: post #91
jedberg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main counterargument is that you have read 1000s of documents to train your brain which produces unique documents with no credit to the original copyright holders. GenAI is just doing the same thing on a larger scale.

Well, if the concept is "we should legally treat the systems just like very big humans", then the next step is to arrest and confine all the leaders of the companies involved on charges of slavery and child exploitation. The distinction does matter in copyright too, since a transformative work needs some non-trivial amount of human input.

Yep, the issue with the parent counterargument is that gen ai is a monetized tool owned and sold by a corporation. People would probably be fine with a human-like embodied ai or something learning in the same way.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#127

Post by miki123211 »

htrp wrote: post #2

>Rates vary by buyer and content type, but Braga said companies are generally willing to pay $1 to $2 per image, $2 to $4 per short-form video and $100 to $300 per hour of longer films. The market rate for text is $0.001 per word, she added. This is high enough that there should be a market to compensate the end users who created these

With what's happening in the EU with the GDPR on one hand and with the DMA on the other, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the new business model for social media companies.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#128

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

cdme wrote: post #119
spxneo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but many chatgpt users are not using Google as much instead relying on LLMs + RAG ChatGPT is the new search engine and provides far more value to the end user than Google. The issue seems to be people want a payout from OpenAI...but its non-profit

It's a shiny toy — it'll yield worse answers. Much like Google's own AI.

Google search is terrible. Chatgpt is definitively better for searching right now, and i often find myself reaching for it over google for a wide category of questions.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#129

Post by passion__desire »

smegger001 wrote: post #120
passion__desire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Yuval Harari suggests the AI economy will move away from money and man power. What will be important are control over resources and their distribution. These big companies won't care about a number in some database. They won't care about selling stuff to you, maybe in the midterm but not in the long run.

that sounds good until you realize that money is just an abstraction of resources.

Because the economy functions better when decoupled and provides autonomy in current paradigm. Consider a future when those in power, rich don't depend on majority for food, transportation and security or services then they don't have the need to convince you to work for them.

Re: Big Tech's underground race to buy AI training data

#130

Post by passion__desire »

dleink wrote: post #112
passion__desire wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won't be necessary in future AIs. As AIs will start aligning tokens from all the rich modalities of audio, video, 3D with text so that they can express complex ideas, they will bootstrap in proper language generation. I don't think college essays, etc would contain anything novel. Future techniques could smoothly interpolate better creating ever-anew wordmud.

> I don't think [things created by humans] would contain anything novel. That's quite a proposition.

Not every essay is created equal. Plus I don't understand what would a new way of combining same words, given llms already have seen trillions of tokens, would achieve. llms could inpaint to arrive at similar texts.
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