@ben GDPR does not apply to intellectual property, only to personally identifiable information so unless your answers consist mainly of your name and address, they are under no legal obligation to delete them.
@ben If you don't want your content to be used commercially, don't post it to a platform that clearly states in its terms of service "[...] you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you [...]"
"Terms can change without notice" etc clauses are often unenforceable.
People should class-action these predatory scrapers. I BET m$ has used data they did not have rights to for training. Errbody should sue. Sue sue sue. "AI" is the providence of mankind, not some rich douche
It's just a reminder that anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter etc. are scraped, fed into a model and sold back to you.
@julesbl@per_sonne@ben The Tragedy of the Commons has been exposed as not being a real thing by Elinor Ostrom. There are countless examples of common goods from history as well as a few contemporary ones. Gotta agree with Jules, the tragedy is when some wealthy shit steals or exploits a common good for their own gain and there are no rules enforced to nip that kind of behaviour in the bud.
@ben Why do people care if someone like me gets your excellent answer to a coding question by typing my error message into Google (forwarding to SO) or into ChatGPT?
In neither situation were you getting paid. In both situations the middle man makes a buck. In both situations I’m thankful you spent time helping me.
Is it that with ChatGPT I don’t know who to thank?
@hunterhacker@ben with ChatGPT the answer gets turned into atoms and reconstructed, often with errors. It's not showing anyone's answer, it's showing a slop that approximates what it thinks looks most correct.
You have no one to thank, no one to correct, and ChatGPT couldn't start to tell you where the answer came from even if it was 99% from one person.
@hunterhacker@ben it's that chatgpt is fundamentally built off copyright infringement and theft. even if in this situation there's no profit being taken, in other situations there absolutely is. openai is fundamentally scummy, and it's good to push back if you can.
@hunterhacker @wuppy@ben
Yup. OpenAI refuses to reveal what was in their training data.
You may be thankful for an answer to a question but thankful to whom? ChatGPT generates answers claiming it as its own creation and OpenAI gets the credit. At least pre-2023 search engines directed you to the original source.
When asked to create a new game that never existed before, ChatGPT regurgited someone else's game idea and gave it a different name.
@wuppy@hunterhacker@ben Built off copyright infringement, theft and deliberate destruction of the planet. People who are okay with AI / LLMs but think everyone should drive EVs need to get a reailty check, imho.
@mighty_orbot@ben@mighty_orbot@ben The argument isn't about profit, which is pretty clearly outlined. OpenAI's explicit and ultimate intent is to replace people and in the meantime it's spitting out garbage information.
@andrewfelix@mighty_orbot@ben
And their software is laundering the original source of the information from which their AI training data was derived. Doesn't the original author deserve some credit for when ChatGPT regurgitates a lossy paraphrasing of a post scraped from the Internet?
@ben I'm longing for a new set of free (as in beer) software and creative licenses that prevent all this garbage.
I put my software out there so other people can use it, I'm even ok if they make money out of it. But I'm not ok with my work being swallowed by a big machine so that people can print money without even knowing it exists at all.
@ben@agersant@ttntm there are licenses like Do No Harm[1] which talk about environmental damage, though I have yet to come across one which is explicitly about this current batch of nonsense. In some ways it feels like if GPL was enough, we wouldn’t be in this mess; I read a post[2] to that effect a while ago and haven’t gotten it out of my head.
@ben We all told everyone so. All of you. But you all dumped usenet news, public forums and other systems for fancy commercial ones. You all ran to Discord instead of continuing IRC. You all went to Reddit. You all went to Stack Overflow. Oh it was so "convenient".
Or back in time you all thought it would be cool to add information to IMDB without getting paid.
Now we have the fediverse. And what do people do? They sign up for Bluesky and Threads or stay on X "because the press is there, too".
@toor@ben it's doubly fun because every such VC-backed service clearly says in their EULA that they own all submitted content. It was specially pointed out many times, too. Still people act surprised when it actually happens.
@ben They’re not yours, they’re theirs. Jeff Atwood thanks you for your free labour. (I’m kidding, he doesn’t. Feel grateful he even allowed you to contribute in the first place, serf.)
Speaking of Jeff Atwood, isn’t he the guy helping fund Mastodon now? 🤔
Update: been told Jeff left StackExchange a while ago so please substitute whichever Silicon Valley tech bro is currently running it.
@ben I recall hearing somewhere that all that content is a super permissive copy left license and it turns out it is! One that requires attribution and transformations to declare what was changed. I'm sure nothing will come of that but if any lawyers out there want to take up the banner, a person could make a strong argument that open AI is incapable of honoring the license. 🤔
@firecat it sadly does not, because AI training currently does not count as derivative work.
While making a caricature of Mickey Mouse might get you in trouble (except if it’s steamboat willy), creating an almost-but-not-exactly prompt-driven copy-machine is (legally speaking) fair game for anything that was accessible online. @lyonsinbeta@ben
@ArneBab not everything is in EU law, OpenAI has to follow international laws just as Valve Corporation does. Valve tried to make case they don’t have to follow the AU law on refunds. Valve was incorrect because it sold games to Australia people. OpenAI is in the same boat.
@ArneBab it still needs to credit people, if anyone can avoid creditable sources then AI problem is only half of the case. Straight up lying about art, music, code and writing is enough for anyone to dislike the software.
@ArneBab The EU is not an international law, USA laws and other nations follow different rules which does break Creative Commons laws. OpenAI sells to many nations and OpenAI has broken the law on it.
@firecat The EU law is the law that’s relevant where I live. Whether US law is broken by OpenAI will take time to figure out. And money to feed
»The convoluted Frankenstein's monster that is American IP law.«
— Moony, lawyer by day, game law and history explainer as hobby (Moon Channel: Is the New Minecraft EULA Literally 1984?)
@lyonsinbeta@ben this is a huge question. OpenAI argues training their models on others’ work is fair use. Lots of copyright holders disagree and are suing. It will be interesting to see how courts rule on this.
@ben you gave them information for free. You don't own it, they do. That was the working relationship.
Imagine if you were working for a company producing work and you suddenly tried to sabotage that work. That's what you were trying to do, sabotage it. They would be perfectly within their rights to restrict your access.
The moral of this story is, if you want to retain ownership then don't give it away (for free) to someone else.
@martin_piper@ben I'm not buying this. Using a service is not the same as working for a company. There is no working relationship. There is a community where people try to help other people without gaining any salary in exchange, and a company reclaiming all that knowledge as own to speculate using AI. Maybe the moral of the story is to make them stop instead of us having to bear that weight, it sounded like victim-blaming imo.
@asthargf@ben I didn't say it's exactly the same, it is analogous to though. Enough to make the point that the company does own the content that the users contribute for free.
@asthargf@ben it is also not victim blaming because the poster is not the victim. The actual victim here is the forum owner because the posts were sabotaged.
@ben Deleting highly rated answers from StackOverflow is a horrible, horrible idea… This is a huge library of knowledge for everything tech- and programming-related that millions of programmers rely on as a help in learning programming or solving problems. They're right that they don't allow deleting those.
@ben I think in the end you will lose more than you will win because the only thing that can happen is the dissociation of the content from your name which is unfortunate because they will keep your content but no one will know it' was yours
@ben I've often thought that a #Fediverse -based alternative to Quora would be very useful. It seems a Stack Overflow alternative would likely be a good opportunity.
@ben I wonder if you could replace all your answers with ChatGPT-generated versions, which hypothetically will poison the system more through cannibalization.
@ben It's awful business practice, but not surprising at all. SO is tanking because of CoPilot/ChatGPT et al.
They have two options, and I'm sure this means they've decided not to try and sue big tech.
@martin_piper@ben they might be now but were they at the time we agreed to them? I recall them “relicensing” without any regard for the couple of thousand meta downvotes, or all the moderator protests and resignations.
Add comment