Yes, but what I’m telling you this has absolutely nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the impunity of wealth.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data, all very clearly illegal by the letter and spirit of the law, and they have not even been charged for it. The most that happens is that content companies sue in the hopes to get some shares in AI, or sue one AI company because their daddy owns a competing AI company, and those suits seem to ignore the piracy and instead are about whether they needed a separate license to train.
Meanwhile, AI companies are very carefully trying to put liability sponges between it and any lawsuits. Tesla tried (and recently failed) to dump 100% of liability on drivers of it’s “self-driving” cars, and every mission critical AI service is likely to have a human mindlessly rubber stamping AI decisions as fast as they can just so they can be held liable instead of the employer or the AI company.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data
I think it’s worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.
Other than that detail though, I think we’re in furious agreement. You’re simply restating my point, Cory’s point, and the subject of this article’s point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.
Yes, but what I’m telling you this has absolutely nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the impunity of wealth.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data, all very clearly illegal by the letter and spirit of the law, and they have not even been charged for it. The most that happens is that content companies sue in the hopes to get some shares in AI, or sue one AI company because their daddy owns a competing AI company, and those suits seem to ignore the piracy and instead are about whether they needed a separate license to train.
Meanwhile, AI companies are very carefully trying to put liability sponges between it and any lawsuits. Tesla tried (and recently failed) to dump 100% of liability on drivers of it’s “self-driving” cars, and every mission critical AI service is likely to have a human mindlessly rubber stamping AI decisions as fast as they can just so they can be held liable instead of the employer or the AI company.
I think it’s worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.
Other than that detail though, I think we’re in furious agreement. You’re simply restating my point, Cory’s point, and the subject of this article’s point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn’t the tech, it’s the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.