Tales from the Bitface

AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok.

Cory Doctorow’s latest piece is the script of a talk he gave on ‘AI’, or more specifically, ‘how to be a good AI critic.’ He’s writing a book on the same subject.

I found it weirdly comforting in one specific area. That of the supposed copyright-infringement of the training of LLMs. Cory explains why it did not, in fact, infringe copyright:

First, you scrape a bunch of web-pages. This is unambiguously legal under present copyright law. You do not need a license to make a transient copy of a copyrighted work in order to analyze it, otherwise search engines would be illegal. Ban scraping and Google will be the last search engine we ever get, the Internet Archive will go out of business

And he goes on from there, explaining why the subsequent steps in training also do not infringe. Some would disagree, of course, and many would say they put their work on the web with a ‘Not for commercial use’ type of licence, such as a Creative Commons one.¹

Which is fair enough too. I don’t think many would disagree with the idea that using the web to train these things was unethical; even more so with using pirated books. But it wasn’t strictly in violation of copyright (at least the current state of US copyright).

Why do I find that comforting? What I mean is, it removes or slightly reduces one of the reasons to be opposed to, or appalled by, these prediction machines, which I alluded to in one of my earlier thoughts about the matter. And in doing so maybe helps me in my quest to understand my own feelings, by at least reducing the number of things I have to consider.

Something like that, anyway. Read the whole of Cory’s piece, it’s very good.