With the latest announcement regarding google allegedly paying reddit 60million per year for access to user created content to train their AI, what is stopping companies from using the freely available information on the lemmyverse to do it for free?

How does everyone feel about the likelihood of this already happening and should something be done about it?

  • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Technically copyright stops them. I know, the whole copyright debate on AI training hasn’t been settled. But when you sign a contract with reddit or dropbox, I assume it includes a licence to use the content to train AI.

    Here on Lemmy, I never gave a licence to my instance to reuse my content. and I keep full copyright on the content.

    Well I know, nobody cares about copyright, but there is a difference between OP downloading a torrent of my little pony and a company making tons of money out of it. Remember that the pirate bay founder got jail time,

    • cosmic_skillet@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Do you keep full copyright of your posts and comments here? Especially given the federated international nature of the platform, I’m not clear on how copyright works on Lemmy.

      • Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        IANAL, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t

        • At the moment you create intellectual content you have copyright on-it

        • Many lemmy instance haven’t filled the legal term and service parts and the one who did do not include the You grant us a perpetual commercial licence on your content therefore, they don’t have to share your content without your consent. A picky lawyer may even argue that you never agreed that your content would be federated (But could also argue that it’s implicit when publishing to the federation)

        So with my limited understading on copyright, an AI company scrapping lemmy’s data would potentially be infringing copyright (well there is an ongoing legal case against open AI so we’ll know whether AI training is considered as re-using copyrighted data). That said, I have no doubt that it’s occuring. Not only I’d struggle to identify my content in an AI model (Well someone speaking some frenglish while forgetting the plural s and mixing some letters on the keyboard ? Could be a lot of person) but lawyers are expensive, and I have better thing to do with my money.

        Judging by the kind of content we have on the fedi, I can’t wait to see AI sying stuff eat the rich, Blahaj is so cuuuuuuuuttte ewewewew, There is no OS but GNU and Stallman is the prophet, Capitalism is the problem, we need to re-establish the proletariate dictatorship would at least be fun.

        • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
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          7 months ago

          Judging by the kind of content we have on the fedi, I can’t wait to see AI sying stuff eat the rich, Blahaj is so cuuuuuuuuttte ewewewew, There is no OS but GNU and Stallman is the prophet, Capitalism is the problem, we need to re-establish the proletariate dictatorship would at least be fun.

          If someone did create an LLM using fedi content and let it loose in the comments, I wonder how long it would take for people to realize it’s a bot? I’m sure not flagging it as a bot is a violation of most instances rules, and it existing would probably upset some people, but it’s still a fun question.

    • Draconic NEO@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Realistically with how Fediverse works they could just ban his actor from their collection node and it’ll ignore all requests made by him or replies to him, as if they never even happened.

    • Kayn@dormi.zone
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      7 months ago

      Ironically, their comments are more accessible than anyone else’s here.

  • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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    7 months ago

    They have to pay Reddit now as the api is gone. I’m quite certain that at least one of the companies scraping the web to train their LLM have been using it.

    And I’m quite certain that this happens to fediverse as well. You don’t even need an api, just set up your own instance. Make a few thousand accounts and sub all over using these. You got all the data in a nice db

  • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
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    7 months ago

    Nothing is stopping them from doing it, and the only reason it might not be already happening is the possibility that nobody has cared enough to bother yet.

    And by design nothing much can be done about it. That’s the nature of a decentralized platform - it’s explicitly set up to share content, and that’s what it does, by default. And there is no central authority that can control access to the fediverse as a whole. And that’s pretty much that.

    And personally, I don’t care. I’ve never bought into the nonsensical idea that the stuff I post in a public forum is in any meaningful sense my property after I post it.

    • Platypus@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Agreed–if I put up a poster on a billboard, I’m not really in a position to complain if someone takes a picture of it.