Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web
Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web

That is not how fair use works.

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web
That is not how fair use works.
And this is why I don't have ANY moral qualms about pirating shit: they'd do it to us in a heartbeat if there was a buck to be made.
*have done
They would?? They are**
I had some, but not anymore.
Pirating Windows for your own personal, private use, which will never directly make you a single dollar: HIGHLY ILLEGAL
Scraping your creative works so they can make billions by selling automated processes that compete against your work: Perfectly fine and normal!
bunch of fuckin art pirates. crying about software piracy while they have their own bots pirating everyone's art.
It’s not even piracy though. I never saw anyone torrent Windows_XP_Home_Cracked.iso and go “Hey guys, check out this operating system I made!”
Do people still pirate Windows? You can download the iso directly from Microsoft's website and you don't need a registration key anymore.
You do need a registration key, but now it's tied to the hardware so it activates as soon as you connect to the network, no need to actually type the registration key.
Sure bud, pirating some Microsoft Studio video games and windows ISOs right now. What? I found them on the open web!
Honestly just pirate their games since they keep buying every fucking studio they can get their grummy hands on
Starlancer was nice I think
I mean, Xbox one/series recently got proof of concept jailbreak, so... I think many people are on board with your thought
DMCA for them, no DMCA for us.
You're always morally justified to steal from Microsoft
So if I see it on the “open web”, I’m free to use it however I please? Oh, I get thrown in jail and everything I own taken away.
If companies are people per “citizens united”, why doesn’t the same apply to them?
And if a company makes a negligent decision, which kills a million people over time, why is no one being put on death row? They can and do have it both ways, but I can still wish for a just world where if companies are people, they can be put to death for mass casualties caused by their decisions.
so we can steal Microsoft's products?
Yes. Exactly. Although there isn't much left worth stealing from Microsoft.
(This was a low-key "Microsoft bad, Linux supreme", comment.)
(And now it's no longer low-key.)
(I'm using a touch-screen keyboard for writing this. And yet I can't open my doors using the keyboard. Ever wondered why that is?)
(Correct, because I forgot my keys at home and didn't put them on my keyboard.)
(Now it's just a –board.)
(Oral diarrhea over. Go get some guhd Linux!)
This is the year of the linux desktop!
By our powers combined, we'll exceed 2% market share!
(no actually, please support linux. I just switched like a month ago and while it's so much better than windows there are so many petty annoyances that will never get resolved unless more people bitch about it and that kind of support needs more users)
Skype is Worth the most, probably.
Let's be real, they let most of it be stolen
In ex-USSR it was pretty intentional.
That explains why my friend's Xbox got stolen. It was an original Xbox, too. Holds eggs perfectly.
i meant stealing like it all not just some random person's version.
In other news: we have lawyers to protect our copyrights, you don't. Suck it.
It's okay to plagiarize books if they're in a library.
No you have to run them through an elaborate model first, then it's totally legit to use someone else's literal words as if they were your own
I mean, that's how I got through high school. So sure.
You're describing how human beings learn and create.
copying isn't stealing
If the model isn't overfitted it's also not even copying. By their nature LLMs are transformative which is the whole point of fair use.
So I have a LLM read a book and paraphrase its contents, that's not stealing?
copying is not theft
"Copying is theft" is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
You realize that half of Lemmy is tying themselves in inconsistent logical knots trying to escape the reverse conundrum?
Copying isn't stealing and never was. Our IP system that artificially restricts information has never made sense in the digital age, and yet now everyone is on here cheering copyright on.
You wouldn't download a car!
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software
No we don't, copying copyrighted material is copyright infringement. Which is illegal. that does not make it theft though.
Oversimplifying the issue makes for an uninformed debate.
Issue is power imbalance.
There's a clear difference between a guy in his basement on his personal computer sampling music the original musicians almost never seen a single penny from, and a megacorp trying to drive out creative professionals from the industry in the hopes they can then proceed to hike up the prices to use their generative AI software.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of AI but I'm generally of the view that anything posted on the internet, visible without a login, is fair game for indexing a search engine, snapshotting a backup (like the internet archive's Wayback Machine), or running user extensions on (including ad blockers). Is training an AI model all that different?
You can't be for piracy but against LLMs fair the same reason
And I think most of the people on Lemmy are for piracy,
Yes, it kind of is. A search engine just looks for keywords and links, and that's all it retains after crawling a site. It's not producing any derivative works, it's merely looking up an index of keywords to find matches.
An LLM can essentially reproduce a work, and the whole point is to generate derivative works. So by its very nature, it runs into copyright issues. Whether a particular generated result violates copyright depends on the license of the works it's based on and how much of those works it uses. So it's complicated, but there's very much a copyright argument there.
None of those things replace that content, though.
Look, I dunno if this is legally a copyrights issue, but as a society, I think a lot of people have decided they're willing to yield to social media and search engine indexers, but not to AI training, you know? The same way I might consent to eating a mango but not a banana.
Didnt you hear? We stan draconian IP laws now because AI bad.
Is it that or is it that the laws are selectively applied on little guys and ignored once you make enough money? It certainly looks that way. Once you've achieved a level of "fuck you money" it doesn't matter how unscrupulously you got there. I'm not sure letting the big guys get away with it while little guys still get fucked over is as big of a win as you think it is?
Examples:
The Pirate Bay: Only made enough money to run the site and keep the admins living a middle class lifestyle.
VERDICT: Bad, wrong, and evil. Must be put in jail.
OpenAI: Claims to be non-profit, then spins off for-profit wing. Makes a mint in a deal with Microsoft.
VERDICT: Only the goodest of good people and we must allow them to continue doing so.
The IP laws are stupid but letting fucking rich twats get away with it while regular people will still get fucked by the same rules is kind of a fucking stupid ass hill to die on.
But sure, if we allow the giant companies to do it, SOMEHOW the same rules will "trickle down" to regular people. I think I've heard that story before... No, they only make exceptions for people who can basically print money. They'll still fuck you and me six ways to Sunday for the same.
I mean, the guys who ran Jetflicks, a pirate streaming site, are being hit with potentially 48 year sentences. Longer than a lot of way more serious fucking crimes. I've literally seen murderers get half that.
But yeah, somehow, the same rules will end up being applied to us? My ass. They're literally jailing people for it right now. If that wasn't the case, maybe this argument would have legs.
But AI companies? Totes okay, bro.
Aight, I'ma steal leaked Windows XP source code :3
There is a thing called usage licenses.
So its no longer intellectual property if its on the internet? The nerves on this guy...
So you could just copy and use every single helpful support article from Microsoft?
Oh shit, there aren't any
Just yet another proof, that the more 0's you have in your valuation, the less the laws apply to you
Apparently he thinks data is like the ducks you find in the park
Wait, you can steal from those ducks?
No one ever tells you this, but you can just take the ducks. Just like with the city pigeons. Just make sure you don't take a government drone by accident.
In that I can take a picture of them and you wouldn't notice or be impacted by it?
You can take the ducks you know
Clearly ducks you find in the park is just free meat. Why else would they be there?
To ask of you have any grapes
Does Netflix count as the open web? It definitely feels like so, but I'm ready for a wealth hoarder to tell me otherwise!
Is his personal-information on the dark-web?
Is he saying that if his personal-information is on the dark-web, then it's perfectly-OK for everybody & their robot to be using it??
XOR is he saying that there are 2 kinds of law:
1 for protecting his entitlement,
the other for disallowing rights from the lives he consumes, through his beloved herd/corporation/pseudo-person?
( obviously, he's already answered the latter )
I agree
Oh hey, Microsoft support moving away from copyright!
He's right, information wants to be free. Don't support stronger copyright just to spite people it'll benefit
In fact just the other day information wanted a ham sandwhich before I set it free so it could find more people not on an empty stomach :/
Essentially the joke everyone made about nfts.
I think that with respect to content that’s already on microsoft.com, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.
Yeah, that's how I've always thought of it.
Its not stolen if it is still there afterwards.
Oh yeah, tell me about Intellectual Property, Patent, Invention, and Ideation thievery, was it still there afterwards? IP theft has been recognized for centuries.
Back to the basement Mustafa Jr..
Yes but you don't have a right to create derivative works which by definition is all that AI can spit out.
I am so glad humans are never derivative with culture. Just look at the movie The Fast and Furious. If we were making derivative works we would live in some crazy world where that would be a franchise with ten movies, six video games, a fashion line, board games, toys, theme park attractions, and an animated series that ran for six seasons.
Copyright infrigment is not theft, training models is not copyright infringement either. We need a law equivalent to when an artist says "he's inpired by someone else" . That it specifically is illegal to do that without permission if you use a machine. That will force big tech to pay a pittance for it and it will instakill all the small player.
Creating a derivative work without a license to do so would be copyright infringement.
Copyright Infringment strawman argument. When considering AI, we are not talking legal copyright infringement in the relationship between humans vs AI. Humans are mostly concerned with being obsoleted by Big Tech so the real issue is Intellectual Property Theft.
artificial INTELLIGENCE stole our Intellectual Property
Do you see it now?
What I see is a system of laws that came about during the Middle Ages and have been manipulated by the powers that be to kill off any good parts of them.
We all knew copyright was broken. It was broken before my grandparents were born. It didn't encourage artists or promise them proper income, it didn't allow creations to gradually move into public domain. It punished all forms of innovation from player pianos to fanfiction on Tumblr.
It's only theft as long as you cling to the failed "copyright" model.
Big tech couldn't steal anything if we don't respect their property rights in the first place.
By reifying copyright under the AI paradigm, we maintain big tech's power over us.
The truth is chatgpt belong to us. ClosedAI is just the compiler of the data.
If we finally end the failed experiment of copyright, we destroy their mote.
You cant steal data. violating copyright (Which ai training does not do) is not theft.
violating copywright (Which ai training does not do) I would say that's still very much up for debate, legally and morally
At the risk of being pedantic, I should point out that morality doesn't come into the question. Copyright is a matter of law, and nothing else. Personally, I don't consider it a legitimate institution; the immorality is how companies wield it like a cudgel to entrench their control over culture.
There is no moral issue.
Anyone in this thread is creating derivative works and you should not be reading it without the written permission of verge.com's parent company.
So Mustafa steals from the entire world and justifies it by pointing to an abstraction that cannot be proven. It's already complete as they can admit it now and throw Billions at corrupt judges over a decade which will be too late.
These tech-god pyschopaths hate us.
Man this is fucking asinine. No one hates you. Certainly not the actual researchers and engineers building these products.
Capitalism fucks over everyone who's not immediately useful. AI is just modelling algorithms after neurons and discovering that that lets us solve a whole new class of fuzzy pattern matching problems.
The two of them together promises to fuck us over even more because that was one of the main things that we used to be better than computers at, but the solution is not remove the new technology from the equation, it's to remove the old and broken system of resource allocation that has and continues to fuck us no matter what.
Look at this AI paid influencer everybody! Who pays you Mustafa Jr? Most everyone knows that AI is gigging them now. When you steal from the world, that is definite hate but It was meant in the aggregate, stupified sanctimonious simpleton.
P.S. Take your "Capitalism Sucks" Marxist bullshit back to Russia, Vatnik and take Mustafa with you.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.
When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:
That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.
Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:
Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.
Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.
The original article contains 351 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Look, guys! The TLDR bot is stealing!
Yeps. The same way when my coworkers talk about sports ball without the expressed permission of multiple corporations.
That's funny, so do I.
Hey ChatGPT , download “The Boys” for me.
The web isn't open because we have to pay to access it.
I can see a lot of comments against copyright here, but has anyone considered the implications of changes to copyright on copyleft?
I argue copyleft is demonstrably socially useful in locking things open. I do wonder if we'll end up the two being different legally....
Perfect I will actually just start putting copyrights statements both on my site and in the source code. Ughhhh!!! But fine if you wanna go down this rabbit hole LFG bitch!!!!