It uses too much power.
They steal from those that actually create work and don’t pay them for the [sarcasm] privellege [/sarcasm]. People have to eat and as creatives we need to be paid for our work, or those feeding the models data need to create the work themselves which they can’t do because most of them have invested 0 time or effort into actually being creative in that way. Which is why they do this, because most of them have no actual skill and are envious of those who do.
I also, just in general don’t want my conversations to be used to fuel some bot that makes money for someone else. It’s bad for privacy and also, what am I getting out of it? Nothing materially beneficial that I can see and it’ll probably endanger mine or someone else’s life.
Its results are often bad, as in inaccurate or downright dangerous.
It’s just the latest line in a long list of scams designed to give money and power to those on the top of the pile already, see: Cryptocurrency, nfts, loot boxes, microtransactions etc.
You should read these two articles from Cory Doctorow. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand
When I bring this up, people keep talking about copyright. I’m not really sure why as I don’t explicitly say anything about copyright. I’m personally against copyright, what I’m for is two things:
Creative people, under a system where they need money to live and to continue to create art of all types to get paid and consent.
The first is a very important point because, if you don’t have to pay an actual artist to create things then they won’t get paid and thus won’t be able to live, that’s why Machine Learning is bad under capitalism.
The second is also very important but that tech obsessives and big companies time and time again don’t care enough about. Consent should be sought explicitly before any data is used, time and time again this is not done, so, the next point about consent should be brought up in that consent should be able to be revoked at any point for any reason without consequences for the revoker.
That’s what I care about, not copyright in and of itself, I care about people getting paid at a price they’ve set for every piece of data that’s fed into the machines and explicit revocable consent being given to train the machines, that’s it.
If those two conditions are met then personally then I’d likely have no problem with it.
Edit: Yes, I also agree a lot of the ‘creative industrial complex’ is also bad and should be abolished, a lot of the companies that control the ability for artists to gain access to mass reproduction of their work and mass distribution I am also very much against.
The internet has been somewhat of a levelling space in regards to this. However, such things like spotify etc are also bad as they are owned by the big companies and so pay the artists little and get away with it, which is why I always do my best to pay the artist directly and buy their music, if film and tv shows were stripped of DRM and I could just buy the files directly I’d do that too.
Edit 2: I’m very glad for things like ko-fi and comradery in that they’re trying to be good, non venture capitalist backed funding sources for people and I think that’s wonderful and more artists deserve to get paid on those. I personally think patreon is bad and fewer people should use it because as they’ve shown, since they’re venture capitalist backed, VCs are their real customers, not those using it to get paid.
Did you read the first one?
Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research
The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/
What you want would give Disney broad powers to oppressively control large amounts of popular discourse. I acknowledge that Specific expressions deserve protection and should retain specific rights, and rights they don’t have always enabled ethical self-expression and productive dialogue. Wanting to bar others from analyzing your work to keep them from iterating on your ideas or expressing the same ideas differently is both is selfish and harmful.
You’re against the type of system you desperately want to become. Using things “without permission” forms the bedrock on which artistic expression and free speech as a whole are built upon. I don’t think any state is going to pass a law that guts the core freedoms of art, research, and basic functionality of the internet and computers.
