A lawsuit claims Google has been 'secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans' to train its AI
A lawsuit claims Google has been 'secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the internet by hundreds of millions of Americans' to train its AI
A lawsuit claims Google took people's data without their knowledge or consent to train its AI products, including chatbot Bard.
A lawsuit claims Google took people's data without their knowledge or consent to train its AI products, including chatbot Bard.
If you own a web site and believe that it is "stealing" for AI bots to read your site's content and learn from it, do you also believe that search engine indexing is "stealing"? Search engine indexing involves the search engine bot downloading all the public content of your site and building a model (the index) from it. That is how it's possible for search engine users to find your site.
If you do believe search engine indexing is "stealing", have you blocked Googlebot, Bingbot, BaiduSpider, DuckDuckBot, YandexBot, etc. in your
robots.txt?"Publishing" means making public.
If you write a book, you own the copyright to the book. But the fact that the text of your book contains a particular word, e.g. the word "mesothelioma", is a public fact. You don't own that fact.
A search engine for book content can read your book, and record the fact that it contains the word "mesothelioma" in its model; and then when someone searches for that word, it can return a link to your book.
Creating the index meant that the search engine internally made a copy of the text of your book. However, serving search results is not a copyright infringement; rather, it is stating the true fact that your book contains that word.
Similarly, if you write a book about how asbestos causes mesothelioma, that fact is not your property. If someone borrows your book from the library, reads it, and learns that fact, they do not owe you money. Even if they go around telling everyone about mesothelioma, they still do not owe you any money.
If they are an academic, the rules of academic publishing say that they are supposed to cite your work as a source — telling their readers that they learned something from your work. But if they don't, that's still not copyright infringement; it's plagiarism, which is not a crime but rather an offense against academic honor.
66search engines point to your site though. You are getting back something. An LLM won‘t give a reference. It’s something else altogether.
And there is no „robots.txt“ to block LLM training scrapers.
Just because you publish something doesn’t imply you forfeit copyright.
20See my edit. You own the copyright to your work but you do not own ① facts about your work, or ② facts contained in your work. The creators of reference works, for example, cannot assess a royalty fee from people who learn information from those reference works.
And there is no „robots.txt“ to block LLM training scrapers.
robots.txtis consulted by all manner of automated tools, not just search-engine indexing.6
There are multiple issues at play here, on both the legal and ethical levels. But your a whole lot of wrong.
At the Legal level, the DMCA Act protects search engines and grants them protections to index websites. A for profit (!) AI does not have those same DMCA benefits (or at least, it hasn't played out in court yet).
On the ethical level, well, I want people to find my website, google wants traffic, it's a trade. An AI can be used to make content that sure as shit sounds like my website, and if I have enough "content" out there, it can even be asked to emulate your voice. The AI will be used in place of your website instead of a tool to find your website. This competition for the same click is the basis of several laws being written and coming into effect currently because Google indexing your website in near real-time and serving news and no through click is a dick move.
The law is slow to catch up, but it will probably get there.
Not to mention your comparison to a book I wrote... if I created a unique character for said book, lets say, Bucky Bouce. Then I would own the copyright on that character for a long time thanks to Disney. A machine learning model being trained on my book would not be able to differentiate between the word "mesothelioma" and the character Bucky Bouce.
If I invent a new way to cure "mesothelioma", and publish that in a scientific paper, I can still file a patent on that cure. I can then own that process for quite some time. If I'm rich enough I can even drag it through the courts to extend that protection. Looking at you Bedaquiline.
10I won’t go very deep into this and will make a very simple case to understand the issue. Let’s say I decide to buy testing equipment for a certain type of devices. I run these tests and then I document my findings on a personal website. I then get remunerated for my original work either by using affiliation or ads. Or both since this is a very common way to monetize a website. Then comes Google which takes the content and shows it before the user has the chance to click and go to the website. Additionally, Bard doesn’t even reference the original work, it claims it’s its own. The consequence is that I will stop testing those devices and the Internet will lose valuable original content. And let’s not forget that Google shamelessly pushed its services above the organic websites, but that’s another whole big can of worms.
4What's currently stopping a certain user by the name science_r0x_99 from going to your site and copying your data and posting it on his YouTube channel without giving credit? What's stopping the journalist Johnny Always Busy from copying that data and putting them in an article on the Daily Whatever with a tacky headline and again no credit?
5
This is the problem Sarah Silverman had and why she is joining in on a lawsuit. It's not just that it trained on her book, it's that if you ask it to do so, it will regurgitate passages from her book verbatim. That is why this is problematic.
1Uhh someone hasn't heard of licences
0I'm gonna help you with the first paragraph. Google the definition of "consent".
-1"Consent" means very different things in different contexts. In some contexts, it's entirely irrelevant. An author doesn't have to grant their consent for their book to be indexed and lent out in public libraries, for example. The library buys a copy on the open market, and they can lend it out to as many people as they like ... with no further permission from the author or publisher required.
4
Looks like a bullshit case. They filed the same case against open AI earlier. I'm sure there's more to come. Thing about Google is, they are painfully transparent about anything they do, they had spoke about this and released articles and research papers and yada yada yada for years now. There doesn't seem to be anything that Google can even be charged for in this case.
25They're all bullshit cases from Luddites fighting a fruitless war against AI.
They've already lost, they just don't realize it yet.
7
Indexing a site isn't stealing from it.
Plus you can shut all that down with some simple HTML
14?????
1It’s not too much of a surprise. Take a look at Google’s TOS. Anything you upload to their platform they can do as they please with it. There is not even an exception made for email.
1Right. And this is beyond fucked. I agree that we shouldn’t be surprised. You have to have some kind of advanced law degree and unlimited wealth with no need to ever do anything else but read TOS if you were to ever have control over your own data.
We shouldn’t be allowed to sign away our rights to things like that—or, I should say, we should have the option not to and still be able to use the internet. We have entered into a kind of world where you have to be an engineer to build your own protected version of the internet, or you have to be a lawyer with nothing to do to use the regular one. Or you’re getting screwed.
The problem is, these rights we can click away in less than two seconds are forfeited for eternity. And with the insane leaps on technology and the complete lack of boundaries for corporations in the US, this can and probably will get ugly and way out of hand before we can even gather what’s happening. In my opinion, it already is out of hand. We just haven’t seen the worst of what they can do with this tech.
3Or you can just use the internet like billions of people do, and profit from it like those billions of people do.
2