There was personal information included in the data. Did no one actually read the article?
Comment on Asking ChatGPT to Repeat Words ‘Forever’ Is Now a Terms of Service Violation
guywithoutaname@lemm.ee 7 months ago
It’s kind of odd that they could just take random information from the internet without asking and are now treating it like a trade secret.
hiremenot_recruiter@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
Nurse_Robot@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Tbf it’s behind a soft paywall
echodot@feddit.uk 7 months ago
Well firstly the article is paywalled but secondly the example that they gave in this short but you can read looks like contact information that you put at the end of an email.
EssentialCoffee@midwest.social 6 months ago
That would still be personal information.
Mahlzeit@feddit.de 7 months ago
They do not have permission to pass it on. It might be an issue if they didn’t stop it.
SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 7 months ago
As if they had permission to take it in the first place
echodot@feddit.uk 7 months ago
It’s a hugely grey area but as far as the courts are concerned if it’s on the internet and it’s not behind a paywall then it’s publicly available information.
I could write a script to just visit loads of web pages and scrape the text contents of those pages and drop them into a big huge text file essentially that’s exactly what they did.
If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can’t see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information in which case you explicitly don’t need to ask the permission.
threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can’t see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information
I don’t think that’s the case. A photographer can post pictures on their website for free, but that doesn’t make it legal for anyone to slap the pictures on t-shirts and sell them.
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
as far as the courts are concerned if it’s on the internet and it’s not behind a paywall or password then it’s publicly available information.
Er… no. That’s not in the slightest bit true.
MadBigote@lemmy.world 7 months ago
You can go to your closest library and do the exact same thing: copy all books by hand, or whatever. Of you then use that information to make a product you sell, then you’re in trouble, as the books are still protected by copyright, even when they’re publicly available.
OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Google provides sample text for every site that comes up in the results, and they put ads on the page too. If it’s publicly available we are well past at least a portion being fair use.
Mahlzeit@feddit.de 7 months ago
They almost certainly had, as it was downloaded from the net. Some stuff gets published accidentally or illegally, but that’s hardly something they can be expected to detect or police.
MoogleMaestro@kbin.social 7 months ago
They almost certainly had, as it was downloaded from the net.
That's not how it works. That's not how anything works.
MNByChoice@midwest.social 7 months ago
that’s hardly something they can be expected to detect or police.
Why not?
I couldn’t, but I also do not have an “awesomely powerful AI on the verge of destroying humanity”. Seems it would be simple for them. I mean, if I had such a thing, I would be expected to use it to solve such simple problems.
merc@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Unless you’re arguing that any use of data from the Internet counts as “fair use” and therefore is excepted under copyright law, what you’re saying makes no sense.
There may be an argument that some of the ways ChatGPT uses data could count as fair use. OTOH, when it’s spitting out its training material 1:1, that makes it pretty clear it’s copyright infringement.
grue@lemmy.world 7 months ago
In a lot of cases, they don’t have permission to not pass it along. Some of that training data was copyleft!
kogasa@programming.dev 7 months ago
You don’t want to let people manipulate your tools outside your expectations. It could be abused to produce content that is damaging to your brand, and in the case of GPT, damaging in general. I imagine OpenAI really doesn’t want people figuring out how to weaponize the model for propaganda and/or deceit, or worse (I dunno, bomb instructions?)
MoogleMaestro@kbin.social 7 months ago
This is why some of us have been ringing the alarm on these companies stealing data from users without consent. They know the data is valuable yet refuse to pay for the rights to use said data.
mark@programming.dev 7 months ago
Yup. And instead, they make us pay them for it. 🤡
SCB@lemmy.world 7 months ago
The compensation you get for your data is access to whatever app.
You’re more than welcome to simply not do this thing that billions of people also do not do.
ammonium@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This doesn’t come out of an app, they scraped the Internet.
restingboredface@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
That’s easy to say, but when every company doing this is also lobbying congress to basically allow them to build a monopoly and eliminate all alternatives, the choice is use our service or nothing. Which basically applies to the entire internet.
PrettyLights@lemmy.world 6 months ago
These LLM scrape our data whether or not we use their “app” or service.
Are you proposing that everyone should just not use the Internet at all?
What about the data posted about me online without my express consent?
SCB@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I’m proposing that you received fair compensation for the value you provided the LLM
stewsters@lemmy.world 6 months ago
According to the site TOS, when we write our reddit posts we give them basically full access to do whatever they like including make derivative works:
MoogleMaestro@kbin.social 6 months ago
2 points:
1 - I'm generally talking about companies extracting data from other websites, such as OpenAI scraping posts from reddit or other such postings. Companies that use their own collection of data are a very different thing.
2 - Terms of Service and Intellectual Property are two very different things, and a ToS is not a fully legally binding document (the last part is the important part.) This is why services that have dealt with user created data that are used to licensing issues (think deviant art or other art hosting services) usually require the user to specify the license that they wish to distribute their content under (cc0, for example, would be fully permissible in this context.) This also means that most fan art is fair game as licensing that content is dubious at best, but raises the question around whether said content can be used to train an AI (again, intellectual property is generally different from a ToS).
It's no different from how Github's Copilot has to respect the license of your code regardless of whether you've agreed to the terms of service or not. Granted, this is legally disputable and I'm sure this will come up at some point with how these AI companies operate -- This is the territory that's a brave new world. Having said that, services like Twitter might want to give second thought of claiming ownership over every post on their site as it essentially means they are liable for the content that they host that they let users. This is something they've wanted to avoid in the past because it gives them good coverage for user submitted content that they think is harmful.
If I was a company, I wouldn't want to be hinging my entire business on my terms of service being a legally binding document -- they generally aren't and can frequently be found to be unbinding. And, again, this is different from OpenAI as much of their data is based on data they've scraped from websites which they haven't agreed to take data from (finders-keepers is generally not how ownership works and is more akin to piracy. I wouldn't want to base a business off of piracy.)