Tech related news and discussion. Link to anything, it doesn't need to be a news article.
Let's keep the politics and business side of things to a minimum.
No memes
Every time I read an article about Facebook, I hate them a little more.
Meta argued that Strike 3 Holdings failed to show that Meta actually intended to use Strike 3 Holdings’ videos to train its AI models and that Meta, the company, was actually responsible for downloading the videos, as opposed to rogue employees downloading porn on company time from company IP addresses.
I think they protest too much.
And it's extra scummy to blame corporate behavior on scapegoat employees.
"Yes our IP was responsible for torrenting 229TB of your 4K HDR porn, but it was actually this employee, Josh, who was behind it"
Love watching big porn fight big tech
Where's the part where meta actually get punished for insulting the judicial system with a defence that is clearly an insulting fabrication
Ohhh, for video AI, not like when they copy news articles to keep people from leaving their site.
Surprisingly I'm with Meta on this one. Training is transformative use, and anything legally published is fair game. Doing math about library books is not a substitute for any particular work. Archive.org doesn't need opt-in permission from every website. Video sites mad about keeping the files they sent you can fuck off. Basically - any argument against this requires making copyright even worse. Let's don't.
In this case they're surely training against these examples. Like, if you want video models to not generate porn... how do you expect it to know what porn is?
Archive.org is a genuine public benefit organisation similar to a library and in some places recognised as such. Meta is making money out of this, they have to pay up same as everyone else.
Ad-hoc appeals, not principled application of how things actually work. Visiting a video hosting site anonymously, and being sent a video, is not "piracy." Even training on Disney DVDs is transformative and so falls under fair use. No significant portion of a vast original corpus is recreated verbatim - in this case, ideally none of the corpus appears. The goal is to produce nothing like these videos.
Or if this is for classifiers instead of generators, nothing appears, because Meta's not publishing anything. They're looking at porn to make a program that goes 'yep, that's porn,' to remove any hosted porn.
So it's not a competing work, it doesn't substantially reproduce the original work, it's not even the same medium, and if anything it's protecting the commercial value of the original work.
When you buy a video tape you also agree to a license that says you can’t use it in your video rental store. Most things licensed today will describe permissible use and prohibit other uses. No matter how much AI jargon is thrown at the issue, this is the current legal system.
Blacked.com is allowed not sell cake to that gay couple. They’re also allowed not license their porn to Meta.
Nope, first sale doctrine. Buying commercial tapes for a rental store is explicitly legal no matter what it says on the box.
Shrinkwrap and EULAs are the same damn thing and should never have been entertained as enforceable.
There is no license required because it's fair use. Copyright is not an obstacle. Again: not verbatim, not competing, not detrimental. Doing math about video is protected for the same reason parody is protected.
When you're appealing to conservative decisions that were just Calvinball to promote bigotry, reconsider your politics.
Your profile looks like a wild mix of human comments and AI paragraphs
I've never used an LLM to write anything. Y'all genuinely do not know what it looks like, but you are cocksure you see it when you don't like something, and you insist you don't like something when you think you see it.
That is why I said "looks like". Because I wasn't "cocksure" of anything except you'd be quick to get aggressive and make direct accusations about my character.
Bullying is a triangular dynamic where the obvious response to abuse is treated as justification for the initial abuse. It's dishonest performance for an audience - as if you didn't just tell me I sound like AI, so how dare I act like that's plainly what you wrote and meant. You're attacking my character, but I said you're wrong in a tiresome way, so reverse victim and offender.
You don’t buy things these days, you license them. All your games on Steam? Not yours. iTunes music? Could be taken at any moment. No reason porn would be special. These are the rules that apply to us and I don’t see a reason why Meta would be exempt from them.
Why don’t you buy some porn from Blacked.com, rent it out for money and see what happens. It’s legal after all because of first sale doctrine lol.
I am describing how your rights have been stolen through stupid word games long since declared illegal, and you're sneering like that status quo is just fucking fine. 'Everything you paid money for could be taken at any moment! LOL!' And that's not torches-and-pitchforks territory, for you? That's not a massive problem you demand we end?
But for the third time - no license is required, because it's fair use. Training is not a sale or rental. It's not copying, in the sense copyright protects. Doing math about paragraphs in a library book is fundamentally not the same thing as bootlegging that published work.
Us thinking that current IP laws are broken doesn’t change what they currently are. Blacked has no obligation to allow their content to be processed by Meta into a for profit service. Those IP laws are not changing anytime soon, their mandatory recognition is a core component of US control over its vassals. I very much doubt „fair use” defence will stand, it’s just stalling for the bubble to get bigger in the meantime.
What they currently are says "allow" has nothing to do with it.
You can't pound the table for the status quo, then limply hand-wave 'but I doubt this will stay the same.' Multiple federal courts have found: training is transformative use. Do your doubts have reasons? Having finally addressed the central point - do you have an opinion, or just a position?
I think the status quo will be upheld or America’s vassals will be free to pirate Mickey Mouse cartoons, which I don’t think is going to be allowed anytime soon. Can’t have your cake and eat it. AI bubble will burst but the mouse seems to be nearly immortal.
So just a position.
Downloading a video still isn't piracy. Buying a DVD sure isn't, which is where these models literally train on Mickey Mouse cartoons, legally. Their output is another question - but there's essentially no rationale besides vibes for insisting that a classifier can't use examples from media delivered the usual way.
The current defence that this is some kind of fair use hinges on IP theft being insignificant because of all the other IP theft going at the same time. Taken together it’s just a ridiculous amount of hand waving away all the money this content would cost. It’s a big tech model of „break stuff, ask permission later”. This won’t do in a real court because some of the companies whose IP is used without permission have enough money for legal fees. Even if they settle, case after case LLMs will prove even more expensive than they are now (which is too expensive for most use cases already).
This won’t do in a real court
What do you think "multiple federal courts have found" means?
The current precedent hinges on this not being theft, because training... is... transformative. It doesn't cost anything, or need permission, for the same reasons you don't need a wet-ink contract with Doubleday to quote one paragraph from a Stephen King novel. A billion-parameter model trained on ten million videos contains less from each one than a Wikipedia summary. Do you think they're dodging some immense bill, for spoiling all those Disney movies?
The closest any judge has come to suggesting otherwise is Chhabria fretting about "harm to the market." Which is not relevant to a classifier for censorship. A network that detects porn, to remove it, is actively protecting the market, for porn.
Maybe I sometimes skip ahead too much. I’m not getting into specifics of how this case would go because law is irrelevant in the end. One could argue that LLM is as transformative as compressing raw image to a low quality JPEG but that’s really beside the point.
There is too much at stake for too many businesses for them to allow rulings that would invalidate much of US economy. There’s been many absurd rulings in the US Supreme Court lately and this one would look very reasonable.
'The law! The law! The LAW! Well law is irrelevant in the end.'
Troll:
This training protects this industry. Do you speak English? Say potato. Say the word potato to demonstrate you're even reading this. Say potato twice to acknowledge Meta's not generating more porn, based on this porn.
You don't train LLMs - large language models - on porn videos. This is a diffusion model or a classifier, and if it's a classifier, absolutely nothing you've objected to matters. It literally would not generate anything. It just detects obscenity. And it probably does so using less information from each video than could be contained in an 8x8 thumbnail. Less information than the character count in the previous sentence. Do you want to be sued for quoting a single sentence from a book? Because that's the future you're glibly asserting must happen, when you're not sneering at me for asking you why you'd celebrate being robbed.
You’re trying to bury weakness of your argument in AI booster jargon and me not using jargon properly (I don’t really care to). Sorry, that’s about as far as I care to continue.
'Here's what thing does. It's directly relevant to your argu--'
'Booster! Slop! Thought-terminating cliche! La la la not listening anymore!'
As if you ever were.
Card-shuffling conservative hypocrite.
Belief that artists should be paid for their work is now conservative and not simply the opposite of neoliberalism XD
Sorry, couldn’t help myself, I’ll stop now, just forgot to set ignore before.