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ssm, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@ssm@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I’d like to see this “CEO of AI” stand on the same ground as the CEO of Sex

jqubed, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

I look forward to the lawsuits that will ultimately cost this man his job.

___, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”

Zoop,

Would you mind sharing a link to it here if it’s not any trouble? (Or your handle if that’s easier for you) I’m always looking for new stuff to check out and new people to follow on Mastodon

prex, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

From the article:

Also, in 2022, several unidentified developers sued OpenAI and GitHub based on claims that the organizations used publicly posted programming code to train generative models in violation of software licensing terms

They can argue about it not being a copy all they want. If there is a single GPL licenced line of code scraped then anything they produce is a derivative work & must be licenced GPL.

nice.

unwarlikeExtortion,

The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)

bitfucker,

GPL v2 don’t, which lead to tivoization. But Linus himself didn’t agree with that standing.

threeganzi,

I’ll play the uniformed devils advocate here:

  1. Is the GPL license enforceable?
  2. And if so, I assume “derivative” will still subjective to some degree. Where do we draw the line between derivative and non-derivative?

I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.

They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.

prex,

1: yes

2: Normally derivative works are patched or modified versions of the original. I think the common English meaning would apply & chatGPT et al are fucked. I doubt there is a precedent for this yet.

JCreazy, (edited ) to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

You heard it here folks. Microsoft says if you find something online, it’s free.

toastal,

Which is why I boycott as hard as I can every service this evil corporation provides (migrate your MS GitHub project away now so I can delete this account too)

Rekorse,

Microsoft is in a death spiral.

Even my coworkers who are complete idiots with technology, who actively sabotage themselves every time they touch any piece of hardware and software, have soured entirely on nearly every Microsoft product across the board.

Its funny how quickly people change their minds when they dont understand the technology on a deeper level. Its just: “this is frustrating now I hate it” and no further thought.

lindworm,
@lindworm@chaos.social avatar

@Rekorse @toastal They just reach the same point as professionals, only 10 years later (+/- 2 years)

redux,
@redux@fosstodon.org avatar

@JCreazy @sabreW4K3 I have found a key for windows 11 together with its source code that means that its free now right? :ablobcatreach:

Bakkoda,

Always was.

reagansrottencorpse, to technology in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

I wish Microsoft had anything worth taking for free

renard_roux,

Games?

FuCensorship, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@FuCensorship@lemmy.today avatar
charonn0, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@charonn0@startrek.website avatar

He seems to be confusing “freeware”, which is basically a license for copyrighted work, with “public domain”, which is the absence of a copyright.

xilliah, (edited )

Yeah, but anything you create automatically has a copyright, so for example this comment is not in the public domain. Its use is limited to the context I am using it in; that is, I expect it to be copied for federation purposes, but I wouldn’t say that AI is covered in this context, just genuine readership, moderation, and bots that are ‘part of the community’.

At least that’s the EU stance afaik. Like if I saw this comment on a billboard somewhere I’d see that as a clear breach of copyright and even privacy.

Rekorse,

Thats a great way to put it in a simple way: its wrong to use other peoples content for things they did not expect they would be.

xilliah,

Well, it’s one thing to say an ‘artificial agent’ looks at someone’s work on deviant art and learns from it. It’s another to use that to make money, as I personally can’t imagine many of the posters would have been on board with that.

EnderMB, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.

  • Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
  • There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.
ayaya,
@ayaya@lemdro.id avatar

What you’re asking for is literally impossible.

A neural network is basically nothing more than a set of weights. If one word makes a weight go up by 0.0001 and then another word makes it go down by 0.0001, and you do that billions of times for billions of weights, how do you determine what in the data created those weights? Every single thing that’s in the training data had some kind of effect on everything else.

It’s like combining billions of buckets of water together in a pool and then taking out 1 cup from that and trying to figure out which buckets contributed to that cup. It doesn’t make any sense.

EnderMB,

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

ayaya,
@ayaya@lemdro.id avatar

Sorry, I misinterpreted what you meant. You said “any AI models” so I thought you were talking about the model itself should somehow know where the data came from. Obviously the companies training the models can catalog their data sources.

But besides that, if you work on AI you should know better than anyone that removing training data is counter to the goal of fixing overfitting. You need more data to make the model more generalized. All you’d be doing is making it more likely to reproduce existing material because it has less to work off of. That’s worse for everyone.

socphoenix,

It’s not impossible lol. All a company would need to do is keep track of where they were getting content. If I use a script to download as much of the internet as possible and end up with a bunch of copyrighted content I could still get in trouble, hell there was even a guy arrested for downloading jstor without authorization.. Stop letting these guys get away with crimes just because you like the idea of the end product

AstralPath,

Sounds like homeopathy lol

underisk, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@underisk@lemmy.ml avatar

Wow the head of AI for MS doesn’t know what the word freeware means.

possiblylinux127,

The definition is being changed by Microsoft

t3rmit3, to technology in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

There is leaked Windows source code online… Is that also freeware for me to train an OS-building model on?

RootBeerGuy,
@RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Sorry, you need high quality data for training.

vrek,

The Linux source code is also online…

smeg,

Seems like we’re all in agreement that all information should be free, I look forward to them open-sourcing every proprietary bit of code they have

themurphy, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

Fair, then everything I can find on the Internet must be freeware too. Set the sails, matey!

SlopppyEngineer,

No officer, this is not a pirated movie. It’s generated by an AI model I created and trained with data from the internet and the fact that it’s 99% identical to an existing movie is irrelevant.

Agathon,
@Agathon@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

my AI is so good, it generated one that’s 100% identical

plus my AI uses less than 99% of the electricity of Microsoft’s

Fermion,

Can I just call lossy compression AI and use this as a defense?

Iapar,

It is an algorithm… So yes.

M500,

Also, this ground breaking AI model I made to do this was umm accidentally erased and I also forgot how to do make it.

Jury: “seems reasonable”

Annoyed_Crabby, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

It’s freeware until someone else take m$ content without paying them, then it’s copyright infringement.

SuckMyWang, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register

Cool so we can just make up our own rules now. Well, all Microsoft products are freeware now because the same reason this guy

jmcs,

Windows XP code was leaked 2 years ago, so it’s freeware according to this idi… stable genius .

electro1,
@electro1@infosec.pub avatar

Ok… so from now on … when I see a “repackaged” Microsoft product that for some reason… which I don’t care to know… doesn’t ask for a payment… I can use it without restrictions ?!! that’s really nice of you Microsoft … thank you.

GolfNovemberUniform, to privacy in Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models • The Register
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

As one person on Mastodon said, “AI is a toxic industry created by toxic people with toxic ideals”.

possiblylinux127,

I wouldn’t go that far. As it turns out AI is a buzz word and buzz words have little meaning

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Yea I thought about that too. But apparently some people find “AI” useful.

possiblylinux127,

I find LLMs very useful

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Too much of an environmental impact for the usefulness imo.

possiblylinux127,

I don’t care. They are really helpful for a many different tasks. It doesn’t pull that much power to run locally on my machine.

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Mister/miss, LLMs that can run locally are fine. It’s the infrastructure and the large scale of commercial cloud LLMs that create some issues. You have to read some researches on this topic.

Rekorse,

“See I like AI because I’m selfish. Also those bad things are in the past, I’m using an ethical AI system now! But also, who gives a fuck because I only care about myself!”

Yeah you get it guy! Maybe you can be Trumps secretary of technology!

nooneescapesthelaw,

If an LLM can save me 30 minutes writing nice emails and responses and help me brainstorm, debug, or elucidate my thoughts then it is very useful.

Rekorse,

You really put 30 minutes of your own time above all of downsides this has for the rest of us who don’t have a use for it (most of the world)?

nooneescapesthelaw,

What downsides are there?

Rekorse,

All of the resources and energy spent to get you this product you like. You can’t discount what it took to create something just because the final product is small and efficient. Take a look at the manufacturing footprint of nearly all complex hardware.

I’m not saying you created the AI but you are one of its supporters, without which there would be no AI.

If this was all just pitched as developing a new plain English coding language, I think the hype following it would be far more appropriate, but then the funding wouldn’t follow to support the massive development costs of AI.

Its become a circle of hype chasing money chasing hype.

Its not you that is the problem so to speak though, its the collective “you’s” who think the same way.

nooneescapesthelaw,

I’m not discounting it. Improving productivity for office workers by 1% across the world is a massive amount

The power used to train the AI is alot, but after that using the AI uses a lot less electricity, if an AI spikes my gpu by 10 seconds to type something that would have taken me 30 minutes, I’ve saved on electricity:

arxiv.org/abs/2303.06219

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