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apfelwoiSchoppen ,
@apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world avatar

Criminals Plead That They Can’t Make Money Without Stealing Materials for Free.

casmael ,

…………. Then the business is a failure and the company should go bankrupt

nl4real ,

Oh, do you support copyright abolition, then?

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

Y’all have the wrong take. Fuck copyright.

GiveMemes ,

Until the society we live under no longer reflects capitalist values, copyright is a good and necessary force. The day that that changes is when people may give credence to your view.

thurstylark ,

Oh, poor baby can’t make money with an illegal business model. How awful.

masterspace ,

So search engines shouldn’t exist?

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Perhaps. Or perhaps not in the way they do today. Perhaps if you profit from placing ads among results people actually want, you should share revenue with those results. Cause you know, people came to you for those results and they’re the reason you were able to show the ads to people.

scarabine ,

Case law has been established in the prevention of actual image and text copyright infringement with Google specifically. Your point is not at all ambiguous. The distinction between a search engine and content theft has been made. Search engines can exist for a number of reasons but one of those criteria is obeisance of copyright law.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I mean, their goal and service is to get you to the actual web page someone else made.

What made Google so desirable when it started was that it did an excellent job of getting you to the desired web page and off of google as quickly as possible. The prevailing model at the time was to keep users on the page for as long as possible by creating big messy “everything portals”.

Once Google dropped, with a simple search field and high quality results, it took off. Of course now they’re now more like their original competitors than their original successful self … but that’s a lesson for us about what capitalistic success actually ends up being about.

The whole AI business model of completely replacing the internet by eating it up for free is the complete sith lord version of the old portal idea. Whatever you think about copyright, the bottom line is that the deeper phenomenon isn’t just about “stealing” content, it’s about eating it to feed a bigger creature that no one else can defeat.

masterspace ,

I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I really think it’s mostly about getting a big enough data set to effectively train an LLM.

I mean, yes of course. But I don’t think there’s any way in which it is just about that. Because the business model around having and providing services around LLMs is to supplant the data that’s been trained on and the services that created that data. What other business model could there be?

In the case of google’s AI alongside its search engine, and even chatGPT itself, this is clearly one of the use cases that has emerged and is actually working relatively well: replacing the internet search engine and giving users “answers” directly.

Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop.

IMO, to ignore the “carnivorous” dynamics here, which I think clearly go beyond ordinary capitalism and innovation, is to miss the forest for the trees. Somewhat sadly, this tech era (approx MS windows '95 to now) has taught people that the latest new thing must be a good idea and we should all get on board before it’s too late.

masterspace ,

Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop

No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.

Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it’s split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.

Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Sure, but IME it is very far from doing the things that good, well written and informed human content could do, especially once we’re talking about forums and the like where you can have good conversations with informed people about your problem.

IMO, what ever LLMs are doing that older systems can’t isn’t greater than what was lost with SEO ads-driven slop and shitty search.

Moreover, the business interest of LLM companies is clearly in dominating and controlling (as that’s just capitalism and the “smart” thing to do), which means the retention of the older human-driven system of information sharing and problem solving is vulnerable to being severely threatened and destroyed … while we could just as well enjoy some hybridised system. But because profit is the focus, and the means of making profit problematic, we’re in rough waters which I don’t think can be trusted to create a net positive (and haven’t been trust worthy for decades now).

gravitas_deficiency ,

Sounds a lot like a “you” problem, OpenAI.

TotalCasual ,

No, they can make money without stealing. They just choose to steal and lie about it either way. It’s the worst kind of justification.

The investors are predominantly made up of the Rationalist Society. It doesn’t matter whether or not AI “makes money”. It matters that the development is steered as quickly as possible towards an end product of producing as much propaganda as possible.

The bottom line barely even matters in the bigger picture. If you’re paying someone to make propaganda, and the best way to do that is to steal from the masses, then they’ll do it regardless of whether or not the business model is “profitable” or not.

The lines drawn for AI are drawn by people who want to use it for misinformation and control. The justifications make it seem like the lines were drawn around a monetary system. No, that’s wrong.

Who cares about profitability when people are paying you under the table to run a mass crime ring.

masterspace ,

Copying information is not stealing.

TotalCasual ,

Depends on the context. Are you copying someone else’s identity in order to make a passable clone? Are you trying to sell that clone?

A duplication of someone’s voice, commercialized by an unauthorized source, is definitely a form of stealing.

Copying information illegally, such as private information held on a private device, is overwhelmingly illegal.

In general, copying information is only as legal as the purpose behind it.

dinckelman ,

Maybe they should have considered that, before stealing data in the counts of billions

Blue_Morpho ,

Google did it and everyone just accepted it. Oh maybe my website will get a few pennies in ad revenue if someone clicks the link that Google got by copying all my content. Meanwhile Google makes billions by taking those pennies in ad revenue from every single webpage on the entire Internet.

Grandwolf319 ,

To be fair, it’s different when your product is useful or something people actually want, having said that, google doesn’t have much of that going for it in these days.

nick ,

“Too fucking bad”

aesthelete ,

I maintain my insistence that you owe me a business model!

teft ,
@teft@lemmy.world avatar

Sounds like an argument slave owners would use. “My plantation can’t make money without free labor!”

sunzu2 ,

My plantation can't make money without everybody's labour.

masterspace ,

Copying information is not the same thing as stealing, let alone forcing people into slavery.

qprimed ,

appreciate the important reality check, but I think the parent was just highlighting the absurdity of the original argument with hyperbole.

people are in jail for doing exactly what this company is doing. either enforce the laws equally (!) or change them (whatever that means in late stage capitalism).

masterspace ,

Let’s advocate for no one going to prison for scraping information then. Let’s pick the second one where we don’t put more people into prison.

qprimed ,

agreed.

Zoboomafoo ,

How do you think slave owners got bailouts after the 13th amendment was passed and the slaves got freed?

grue ,

Reminds me of that time the Federal government granted land parcels to a bunch of former slaves (using land from plantations) and then rescinded them again.

WHYAREWEALLCAPS ,

They used that part of the 13th that said "Well, except prisoners, those can be slaves." Local law enforcement rounded up former slaves on trumped up charges and leased them back to the same plantation owners they were freed from. Only now if they escaped they were "escaped criminals" and they could count on even northern law enforcement returning them. The US is still a pro-slavery country and will be as long as that part of the 13th amendment stands.

LastJudgement ,

“My private prison can’t make money without more overconvicted inmates!”

salon.com/…/private-prison-demands-new-mexico-and…

bender223 ,

These people are supposedly the smart people in our society. The leaders of industry, but they whine and complain when they are told not to cheat or break the law.

If y’all are so smart, then figure out a different way of creating an A.I. Maybe the large language model, or whatever, isn’t the approach you should use. 🤦‍♂️

ricecake ,

As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

You can certainly argue that “downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training” should be treated differently from “downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder”, but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

Personally, I think it’s a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can’t copy it and share the copy with others.

circuitfarmer ,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

This is the main issue with AI. It is the issue with AI that should have been handled and ultimately regulated before any AI tool got to its current state. This is also a reason why we really cannot remove the A from STEAM.

masterspace ,

No, this is a broader issue with copyright being a fundamentally stupid system, because it’s based on creating artificial scarcity where there is no need for it.

Pirates, Search Engines, the fragmentation of streaming services, and now AI, are all just technologies that expose how dumb a system it is.

circuitfarmer ,
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I dont disagree with that about copyright law. But to think that AI is going to break you out of it is a pipe dream.

Copyright revision will not happen from people stealing content. It requires deep discussion and governments that actually listen. AI stealing content will ultimately enhance copyright rules down the road.

masterspace ,

AI scraping content, the same way that search engines do, will have no impact on the copyright system.

circuitfarmer , (edited )
@circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Totally agree. I did not make the claim that copyright law will be affected.

Rentlar ,

I can’t have a chill movie night at home with friends without being able to pirate movies for free.

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