That was the expectation until Zuckerberg came along. People were putting tons of stuff on BBSs, intranets, and other stuff 20+ years beforehand because people had the idea of "consent" back then existed: using someones information for a purpose they didn't intend was (and still is) wrong.
Lots of art, science and technology can be considered as "using someone's information for a purpose they didn't intend." It is extremely normal for people to find new uses for things; information is not exempt from this.
Whoever treats others' information can only do so with a clear purpose and for a defined time period according to current EU laws.
If, however, you were referring to information that you published on the Internet for everyone's benefit then you would still need to consider intellectual property rights. In the open source software world we have the licenses that deal with this, and then there are copyright laws protecting content providers (not making a case here whether they are good or not).
I guess what makes a difference is if there is some business involved either in the production or in the consumption side of the equation and if we accept that "machine learning" is the same as "human learning".
EDIT: separated paragraphs, typo
There are also cases where loading copyrighted content is unavoidable in order to even view the license terms. For example, a website could deny the right to copy its content before you even see the licensing details. Temporary copies enabled through normal usage like this should be permissible.
Yet you would expect that people won't record your private conversations, and even less play it back to third parties.
Exchanges, of whatever information, whether it is personal stories or administrative data occurs in some kind of trust on what kind use you consent to. Respecting this consent is a social obligation on the receiver end.
How? It seems obviously correct. Suppose we trade nudes. You now sell my nudes online without my consent. You bet I have the right to sue you.
But RTFA, because what it is discussing is not public facebook/twitter posts. I'm not sure why the discussion keeps moving there as if that's the only case. Besides, a public facebook post is still only visible to those on facebook. It is as public as a private country club, even if it's easy to get access. What about what you write in copilot? What about your code on github? In a private repo? The article mentions this is already protected under current law as personal information.
The fundamental problem here is about consent. What would a reasonable person expect? 10 years ago certainly no one expected this. Mass gathering of data was only for the biggest of tech and governments. Now it's in the hands of anyone that wants to train an LLM. Things changed very fast and I think a lot of people are forgetting that.
I just don't think that's the right angle. I think if you're in the public sphere, the way that you anticipated your creations to be used just shouldn't matter at all. If you've given something to the public, the public should not be limited to whatever you thought they'd use it for.
And the conversation keeps coming back to that because people keep making that argument. I specifically agree that private Facebook posts are not covered under this argument! However, I also think that consent as a basis for analysis just doesn't apply to public posts.
As for consent, you may disagree, but that's how our entire legal framework works, and I for one am happy about this. Consent is the foundation of any democracy. A world without consent isn't figuratively tyranny, it is literally tyranny. Agree or not, the law does not give you the right to use any information (words spoken, pictures taken, bits, or whatever) that is publicly available/viewable in whatever way you want. There are rules. It is why Taylor Swift can't even post a picture of herself on Instagram and why you can't follow someone around all day taking pictures of them (aka. stalking). There are limitations because we live in a society and I for one think this is a good thing.
Yes, you are right when posting something public that people shouldn't limits on use for only what the poster explicitly intended. But that freedom is neither unlimited. That's the point I'm making. The line of public and private is getting blurrier by the day. These laws are always made by that of a reasonable expectation. Certainly no one that posted on Facebook 10 years ago had a reasonable expectation that their post would be used to train an LLM.
If we have to lose privacy and control in order to keep our participatory culture, I'm sorry, I'll take culture. If it's a multidimensional topic, I'm for tightening privacy in private spaces and loosening privacy in public spaces. If there's only one axis, I'll push the lever towards loose.
You'd be surprised because these industries have figured these problems out. What is allow without license, what needs royalties, what needs permission, and what can't be done. This was a huge conversation in the 90's and you can find many discussions about hip hop (around sampling) and copyright law.
Your culture is not in danger, even if you don't know its history. I'd suggest learning it though, because that's the best way to ensure your culture stays out of danger (a culture I am also part of fwiw).
Yeah, that's to the best of my knowledge true but IANAL. I'm with you about the fanfic scenario too. I'm also very open about sampling. But I think these issues are different than the data that we're talking about in this thread. If data can be recovered (an in some ways it is, others it isn't) then that's not really derivative. Derivative also needs some distance and not be too close. And importantly, these data are being used to create a product that is being sold. Where the processing of the data is the thing of value.
My point is that the environment has changed and there's a lot of gray area here. Turning this into a binary distinction is unhelpful. There's new nuances here and there were new nuances when sampling became popular in hip hop. We need to have open and honest discussions about these things, and I think a lot of discussions we have or observe are rather dismissive of these nuances (coming from both sides of the debate fwiw). I'm obviously very open to using data but we must also be aware of our data privacy, how it can be used, our social contracts, and what a reasonable level of a priori consent is. If we overly simplify these conversations then they aren't actually discussions. My points are to this, that there is gray and that there are very clear cases where you do not have unlimited access and usage to works that are publicly available. Private ownership is the root of capitalism afterall, and so it should be rather unsurprising that we have many laws and social contracts over ownership and the extent of what one may do with things they did not create. There certainly is a lot of anger and frustration in these conversations and I don't expect an artist making their living off of their art to understand all these nuances nor am I surprised that they are upset and possibly afraid. This is new territory and pretending it isn't is just as obtuse as calling generators fuzzy copy-paste machines.
But I want to be clear that we can have both goals. We can protect data rights, privacy, fairness AND have this sampling and creativity culture, for lack of better words. We just need to be careful, nuanced, and thoughtful to determine how to do this though. We won't be perfect and won't make everyone happy, but we can maximize social agreement conditioned under fairness and privacy. I just want to ensure that we are not approaching this conversation as that there are clear answers in what can be done with data and what can't be. Hell, we don't even have that answer for music, sampling, or fan fiction. We have answers as to what laws say, but even as you point out, that's ambiguous in many cases without even considering that the environment is not only changing, but changing rapidly. I think we all understand that there is a difference between using the Akira slide compared to the "Ice Ice Baby v Under Pressure" scenario. No one has the answers, and that's why we need to talk. And unfortunately "edge cases" are the norm in topics like these.
Note: I am an ML researcher. I use publicly available data to train models that have images of people, their art, their animals, their property, and such that I'm sure many do not know exists in these datasets. Similarly I do not even know all the data within some of these datasets. But I can still recognize that there is a gray area that exists here and personally I see it as my ethical duty to ensure we have these discussions in an open and honest way to determine the limits of what I should and shouldn't be able to do. It isn't up to me, it is up to our society to create a social contract.
Sure, it's a continuum. I'd say it's more that, viewed as a continuum, my opinion about the ends of the spectrum is binary, in that I want one end to go up and the other to go down. That doesn't mean I want to split it into two cases so much as that I want to consider it among other things on an axis between two points, "private" and "public", and my opinion is a function of placement between those two points.
Artists are frustrated about fanfic too! They feel genuine ownership of these characters. I've seen people have borderline breakdowns at fanfics. The idea that people are doing things that they didn't intend to "their" characters can be genuinely traumatic to a writer. If you make that a question about consent then fanfic becomes comparable to abuse, and I just don't agree that those should be the terms. Any work placed before the public is inherently participatory. Copyright splits the world into "creators" and "consumers" and I think that's problematic, because there's no such thing as passive consumption of a work. The listener or reader recreates the experience of the work in their head, based on their own assumptions, preconceptions and personality, and if they have an experience or viewpoint that diverges from that of the author, they must be able to share that in turn. So I have a genuine values disagreement with some of what we currently call "rightsholders" in the matter.
What's that got to do with deep learning? Very little: I just see where it leads if you phrase the topic about consent, and it's not a world where unwashed readers can get their dirty mitts on their characters.
(My personal favorite is... closed-source Minecraft (Java) mods. "Do not decompile against my wishes!", the description said. Minecraft mods, meanwhile, are only possible in the first place by decompiling Minecraft's source code against Mojang/Microsoft's wishes. You were this close to learning something!)
This isn't my recollection of a pre-facebook internet
The early days of the Internet were full of "information should be free" hackers, many of whom roam this very forum in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.
Well, information is free now. And this is what it looks like - consumed by LLMs. We got what we asked for.
I am still firmly in the Information wants to be free camp, and I agree with you that LLMs scanning it is a logical continuation of it all.