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Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

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161–170 of 231 posts

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#161
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I remember Luddites were smart and not against all technology, they were just protecting their jobs. And they were ultimately right. Why? Except for the longshoremen in the US getting compensation and an early retirement due to the introduction of containers, I know of exactly 0 (ZERO!) mass professional reconversions after a technological revolution. Look at deindustrialization in the US, UK, Western Europ…

Stables became gas stations. Nintendo used to be a toymaker. Businesses change and adapt. Workers too — but people often don’t like change, so many choose to stay behind. Should we cater to them? I used to do a lot of work which is now mostly automated. Things like sysadmin work, spinning up instances and configuring them manually, maintaining them. I reconverted and learned terraform, aws etc when it became popular.…

Suppose you're a weaver. It's hard, fiddly work, and you have to get your timing and your tension just right to make quality material. Now, there are mechanised looms that can do the job faster (though the quality's not great: they could still do with some improvement, in your opinion). From this efficiency gain, who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a farmer. You've been working on your tractors for decades, and have even showed the nice folk at John Deere how you do it. Now they've built your improvements into the mass-produced models, and they say you can't work on your tractors any more. Who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a writer. You've spent a long time reading and writing, producing essays and articles and books and poems and plays, honing your craft. You've got quite a few choice phrases and figures of speech in your back pocket, for when you want to give a particular impression. Now, there is a great big statistical model that can vomit your coinages (mixed in with others') all over the page, about any topic, in mere minutes. Who should reap the profits?

Suppose you're a visual artist. You enjoy spending your time making depictions of fantasy scenes: you have a vivid imagination, and, so you can make a living illustrating book covers and the like. You put your portfolio online, because why not? It doesn't hurt you, it makes others happy, and maybe it gets you an extra gig or two, now and then. Except now, there's a great big latent diffusion model. Plug in “Trending on Artstation by Greg Rutkowski”, and it will spit out detailed fantasy scenes, photorealistic people, the works. Nothing particularly novel, but there was so much creativity and diversity in your artwork, that few have the eye to notice the machine's subtle unoriginality. Who should reap the profits?

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#162
post #32

Rather than there being lawsuit after lawsuit of this sort, we wrote an op-ed this morning that says there should be a simple, compulsory licensing fee that AI companies pay to the public -- something we called the AI Dividend: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/29/ai-pay-ame...

1. How would this not make tools like Github Copilot exorbitantly expensive? Why should I have to pay a tax to everyone else in the United States to use something that was disproportionately trained on my own data? 2. Given that the internet is global, is every country supposed to make their own versions of this? Will I have to pay the EU tax to use models that might have been trained on data that Europeans posted on…

To your first question, it would incentivize training of models on one's own data exclusively -- companies could train something like Copilot on their own code, for instance. To your second question, there's no way to have an international policy like this so yes each jurisdiction would do it independently -- just as they do with thousands of other similar things.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#163
post #44

I mean, it ingested all of the content from my blog. Without my permission. It's not a major part of their corpus of data, but still -- I wasn't asked and I don't really care to donate work to large corporations like that. So the technology is cool, but I'm firmly of the stance that they cut corners and trampled peoples' rights to get a product out the door. I wouldn't be entirely unhappy if this iteration of these p…

One thing I've been thinking about: it's only a matter of time before your friends load an AI assistant on their phone, and it devours every text message you have ever sent to that person, every photo you've shared together, every record of an in-person meeting. This makes me really uncomfortable.

That's what bothers me for years now in the context of contacts on smartphones. Maybe I'm making a mistake when thinking about it, but - if I refuse to share my contacts with let's say Instagram, but all of my friends share their contacts list which includes me, does it really matter if I decline to share or not?

Another part which bothers me is that I have lots of different personalities online. On most sites I use different usernames, and I wonder if there will someday be an AI which can match all the different online profile to a single person, even if different username are being used etc.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me where ChatGPT's brain is and your comparison will become relevant.

I mean in the floating point / quantized numbers and the connections that make the model? I'm not sure I follow, the analogy to the human brain has always been obvious, it's even in the name (artificial neural network) ...

The analogy is just that: an analogy, and a very imperfect, misleading one. The working of the brain may have motivated early research, but GPT (as instantiated in hardware) does not operate or learn in a way similar to a human brain.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can read your blog and then post their own blog post using knowledge they learned while reading yours. ChatGPT "learned" from your blog that same way

Since the way GPT "learns" is not materially similar to how a human learns, I don't see why this talking point is particularly relevant. Nothing stops the courts from distinguishing between an AI and a human with regard to what may be permissible.

I agree, it seems like all the arguments that the use of data by AI should have no more restrictions than the use of data by humans hinge on the implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that human learning and machine learning are identical. While there are parallels, there also seem to be significant differences not only in how the learning is done, but also in outcomes for the person whose data is being used. And since a major purpose of IP, copyright, etc. is at least ostensibly to protect the creators of information from negative outcomes, I don't think the outcomes can be ignored when comparing human learning to ML.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#166
post #146
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is additional nuance, but so far public data scraping has very clearly been ruled as legal. It's possible that at the time of scraping, copyrighted data was incorporated into the training data because it hadn't been taken down by the host platform yet. But in my opinion, the core idea proposed by the suit that private data was used intentionally, is not true. The GPT4 browsing plugin is equivalent…

My point is that you have to separate the method for collecting the data versus the usage of the data as separate legal questions. Scraping is legal. What you do with the data that you scrap though is a whole other question. To put it another way, it's legal for me to go to the library and borrow a DVD or a book or poems. That doesn't give me the right to publish the poems again under my own name. Whether I find the…

What you describe misrepresents how LLMs/neural networks and the math works, your analogy does not apply. There's no static data in the networks. The output of LLMs are much closer to parodies and fanfiction. In that case, you very clearly own the copyright to the new work you make.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#167
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One individual right is the right to sign away other rights in exchange for products and services.

Can you point to where that "right" is codified in law?

Common law of contracts dictates that you can commit to performing certain services in exchange for the counter-party performing certain services. For example, you provide both money, viewing data, and permission to run DRM and proprietary code on your property (e.g. set-top boxes or smart TVs) to Netflix in exchange for obtaining access to their library of TV shows and movies.

It's codified in the fact that saying you'll do something means you're socially obligated to do it, and legally obligated if you receive something in return.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#168
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I remember Luddites were smart and not against all technology, they were just protecting their jobs. And they were ultimately right. Why? Except for the longshoremen in the US getting compensation and an early retirement due to the introduction of containers, I know of exactly 0 (ZERO!) mass professional reconversions after a technological revolution. Look at deindustrialization in the US, UK, Western Europ…

Stables became gas stations. Nintendo used to be a toymaker. Businesses change and adapt. Workers too — but people often don’t like change, so many choose to stay behind. Should we cater to them? I used to do a lot of work which is now mostly automated. Things like sysadmin work, spinning up instances and configuring them manually, maintaining them. I reconverted and learned terraform, aws etc when it became popular.…

I don't think we should cater to Luddites, but (and it's a big but) if we automate enough jobs out of existence it's essentially undeniable that we will need systemic changes to avoid becoming a completely dystopian society.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#169
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I do. I own the work I create, even if it's publicly available. I do get to decide what happens with it.

There is a difference between learning from your work and copying your work. You are entitled to control it's distribution and use. You are not entitled to control it's influence and effects.

Actually, people have been successfully sued for plagiarizing other works because they had internalized it and accidentally regurgitated it. So. The fact that content runs through a human brain doesn’t necessarily cleanse it from copyright concerns.

Re: Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why copyright violation should be brutally cracked down on when the copyrights of Microsoft are violated, and lawsuits against Microsoft for intentional and widespread copyright violation should be laughed off. Because capitalism is bad. edit: corporate LLMs have pulled the "one death is a tragedy, ten thousand deaths are a statistic" ploy off fully. If you want people to question whether you're even violating…

Primacy of capital is literally the culprit of the inequality you're complaining about, and the reason you cannot win short of reorganizing society.

It seems people prefer power distributed by capital, rather than military might or factionalism/leaders/politics.

Not that all capital is distributed by merit, plenty of people used military might or factionalism/leaders/politics to obtain disproportionate amount of capital.

But if you are against the last 2 happening, I don't see what you expect a reorganization of society to accomplish since you are going to get a power structure of factionalism/leaders/politics taking priority. (Sorry bud, no an-com utopia ever existed, they all had factionalism/leaders/politics, thus defeating the entire purpose of removing class.)

I think most of us think we can capture/retain power easier with money, than having to climb up inter-party politics.

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