mcc
2008, me: I love the idea of cryptocurrency
BITCOIN: The word "cryptocurrency" now means "financial scams based on inefficient write-only ledgers"
2018, me: I love the idea of the metaverse
FACEBOOK: The word "metaverse" now means "proprietary 3D chat programs with no soul"
2022, me: I love the idea of procedurally generated content
OPENAI: From now on people will associate that only with big corporations plagiarizing small artists and turning their work into ugly content slurry
Joe Ortiz
@ebooksyearn @mcc EyeEm (remember them?) Just updated their ToS basically saying that they'll sell your images to "AI partners".
Jon Renaut
@mcc I'm worried I'm going to have to nuke almost 20 years of photos on Flickr, the first online service I ever paid for, because of AI
mcc
I'm really concerned about the effect "generative AI" is going to have on the attempt to build a copyleft/commons.
As artists/coders, we saw that copyright constrains us. So we decided to make a fenced-off area where we could make copyright work for us in a limited way, with permissions for derivative works within the commons according to clear rules set out in licenses.
Now OpenAI has made a world where rules and licenses don't apply to any company with a valuation over $N billion dollars.
mcc
(The exact value of "N" is not known yet; I assume it will be solidly fixed by some upcoming court case.)
mcc
RONALD LACEY: Again we see, Ms. McClure, there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.
Joe Ortiz
Here's a sample:
Jon Renaut
@joeo10 @mcc I am not familiar with EyeEm but they sound not cool
mcc
…but wait! If you look at what they actually did (correct me if I'm wrong), they aren't actually doing any machine learning in the "stack" repo itself. The "stack" just collects zillions of repos in one place. Mirroring my content as part of a corpus of open source software, torrenting it, putting it on microfilm in a seedbank is the kind of thing I want to encourage. The problem becomes that they then *suggest* people create derivative works of those repos in contravention of the license. (2/2)
datarama
@mcc That's also basically how LAION made the dataset for Stable Diffusion. They collected a bunch of links to images with descriptive alt-text.
(Are you taking time to write good alt-text because you respect disabled people? Congratulations, your good work is being exploited by the worst assholes in tech. Silicon Valley never lets a good deed go unpunished.)
mcc
In a world where copyleft licenses turn out to restrict only the small actors they were meant to empower, and don't apply to big bad-actor "AI" companies, what is the incentive to put your work out under a license that will only serve to make it a target for "AI" scraping?
With NFTs, we saw people taking their work private because putting something behind a clickwall/paywall was the only way to not be stolen for NFTs. I assume the same process will accelerate in an "AI" world.
mcc
Did you see this? The whole thing with "the stack".
https://post.lurk.org/@emenel/112111014479288871
Some jerks did mass scraping of open source projects, putting them in a collection called "the stack" which they specifically recommend other people use as machine learning sources. If you look at their "Github opt-out repository" you'll find just page after page of people asking to have their stuff removed:
https://github.com/bigcode-project/opt-out-v2/issues
(1/2)
josh
@mcc i feel like we need llm opt out considerations in foss licenses tbh, then host code off github and nothing changes? Hard to enforce idk unlikely politicians will get it right, maybe the ftc will get lucky?
clacke
mcc
So… what is happening here? All these people are opting out of having their content recorded as part of a corpus of open source code. And I'll probably do the same, because "The Stack" is falsely implying people have permission to use it for ML training. But this means "The Stack" has put a knife in the heart of publicly archiving open source code at all. Future attempts to preserve OSS code will, if they base themselves on "the stack", not have any of those opted-out repositories to draw from.
mcc
@josh I don't like this because (1) it means GPL2 is dead, and (2) it feels like admitting that an AI opt-out is something we specifically needed. Meanwhile, machine transformation of my work is something I generally want, I just want the license to be observed.
mcc
Like, heck, how am I *supposed* to rely on my code getting preserved after I lose interest, I die, BitBucket deletes every bit of Mercurial-hosted content it ever hosted, etc? Am I supposed to rely on *Microsoft* to responsibly preserve my work? Holy crud no.
We *want* people to want their code widely mirrored and distributed. That was the reason for the licenses. That was the social contract. But if machine learning means the social contract is dead, why would people want their code mirrored?
margot
@mcc have we considered starting a secret society with arcane rites devoted to preserving and protecting open source code
Aedius Filmania ⚙️🎮🖊️
Please don't opt out all your repositories, leave the ones that didn't work or didnt compile or are full of security hole.
csolisr
clacke
@csolisr @mcc @negative12dollarbill I'm not up to date, but I hope as long as you don't buy his brand, there are still cars that are just cars, except with electric engines?
Or are all cars now enshittified, remote-lockable, freezing up for a few hours of firmware update, etc?
Asking sincerely, I imagine it could go either way.
Negative12DollarBill
2010 ME: I love the idea of electric cars!
csolisr
mcc
@clacke @negative12dollarbill @csolisr I'm very interested in the low-power/low-cost electric category currently being rapidly innovated on in China.
Things I don't know about these:
- How is the safety? I mean really?
- Is Joe Biden gonna ban them in the name of US protectionism?
Also, I really don't want computers or cameras in my car. I don't know what those computers and cameras are doing. If it's on the CANbus I don't want it to have the capacity for TCP/IP.
Mark T. Tomczak
@gsuberland @mcc One almost wonders if the end-game is to stop pulling and try pushing.
Maybe instead of trying to claw back data we've made publicly crawlable because "I wanted it visible, but not like that" we ask why any of these companies get to keep their data proprietary when it's built on ours?
Would people be more okay with all of this if the rule were "You can build a trained model off of publicly-available data, but that model must itself be publicly-available?"
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial
@mcc I have generally come to the conclusion that this is an intended effect. All the things you feel compelled to do for the good of others, in an ordinarily altruistic sense, are essentially made impossible unless you accept that your works and your expressions will be repackaged, sold, and absorbed into commercialised datasets.
The SoaD line "manufacturing consent is the name of the game" has been in my head a lot lately.
mcc
@mark @gsuberland In my opinion, a trapdoor like "okay, well if copyright doesn't apply to the training data you stole, your model isn't copyrightable either" is no good. The US Gov has already said GenAI images and text are not copyrightable. It doesn't help. The thing about generative AI is it inherently takes heavy computational resources (disk space, CPU time, often-unacknowledged low-wage tagging work). Therefore, as a tool, it is inherently biased toward capital and away from individuals.
Alien software, human hardware
@mcc "oh no, I'm not pirating movies! In just using them as training data for my organic LLM in my head."
Someone should try that in court.
Megan Fox
@mcc I'm waiting for the programmer equivalent of nightshade.
"This is a perfectly functional library for X, I've just made it delete your entire C drive, but DON'T WORRY you can remove the offending code in file ev6.cpp, line 45"
clacke
@glassbottommeg I was just thinking about that poison model for the StackOverflow situation.
datarama
@pinkdrunkenelephants @mcc That doesn't work if copyright *itself* doesn't apply to AI training, which is what all those court cases are about. Licenses start from the assumption that the copyright holder reserves all rights, and then the license explicitly waives some of those rights under a set of given conditions.
But with AI, it's up in the air whether a copyright holder has any rights at all.
pinkdrunkenelephants
@mcc They should just make a license that explicitly bans AI usage then.
datarama
@pinkdrunkenelephants @mcc In the EU, there actually is some legislation. Copyright explicitly *doesn't* protect works from being used in machine learning for academic research, but ML training for commercial products must respect a "machine-readable opt-out".
But that's easy enough to get around. That's why eg. Stability funded an "independent research lab" who did the actual data gathering for them.
mcc
@pinkdrunkenelephants @datarama Because humans also are the ones who interpret and enforce laws and if the government does not enforce copyright against companies which market their products as "AI", then copyright does not apply to those companies.
pinkdrunkenelephants
@mcc @datarama I guess that's more of a bribery problem than a legal precedent one, then.
pinkdrunkenelephants
@datarama @mcc I don't see how it would be up in the air. Humans feed that data into AI and use the churned remains so it's still a human violating the copyright.
Leonora
@mcc I love the idea of the fediverse
csolisr
datarama
@mcc I feel like an asshole when I say I enjoy (and used to make) "generative art" now.
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