Public content on the internet is public content on the internet - I thought we had all agreed years ago that if you didn’t want your content copied, don’t make it freely available and unlicensed on the internet.
What I don't like is the hypocrisy that basically every AI company has engaged in, where copying my shit is OK but copying theirs is not. The Internet is not public domain, as much as Eric Bauman and every AI research team would say otherwise. Even if you don't like copyright[0], you should care about copyleft, because denying valuable creative work to the proprietary world is how you get them to concede. If you can shove that work into an AI and get the benefits of that knowledge without the licensing requirement, then copyleft is useless as a tactic to get the proprietary world to bend the knee.
[0] And I don't.
My opinion is that individual copyright ownership is a bad deal for most artists and we need collective negotiation instead. Even the most copyright-respecting, 'ethical' AI boils down to Adobe dropping a EULA roofie in the Adobe Stock Contributor Agreement that lets them pay you pennies.
I have bad news
There's your bleeding, sorry truth there. It's only a matter of time until we get another headline like it.
Furthermore, most governments don't like the "march in with a warrant and demand information" approach, because it's loud and noisy. People might move data out of a given cloud if they know there's spooks inside. And more importantly, it creates a paper trail, which they don't want. So there's a lot of effort put into compromising cloud servers by intelligence agencies.
Looking at Apple's blog post regarding Private Cloud Compute[0], they've basically took every security precaution they could to prevent covert compromise of their servers. They also have some fancy attestation stuff that, most notably, creates a paper trail whenever software changes. Once again, spooks absolutely hate this. It's technically possible for Apple to subvert this scheme, but that would require coordination from several different business units at Apple. Which, again, creates a paper trail. Spooks would much rather exploit a vulnerability than demand code signing keys that would provide evidence of cooperation.
To be clear: no, this isn't end-to-end. You can't currently do end-to-end encrypted cloud compute[1]. But it's still Apple putting lots of money into a significant improvement in terms of privacy and transparency regarding cloud services. OpenAI in contrast does not give two flying fucks about your data privacy, and makes building an AI Panopticon one of their deliberate, expressly stated design goals. Their safety team, at least by their own admission, cannot operate without total knowledge of everything their models get prompted with so they can implement reactive controls for specific exploits.
[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
[1] Homomorphic encryption is not theoretically impossible, but imposes significant performance penalties that negate the performance advantages of Apple using a cloud service. I suspect that they at least gave it some thought though.
Edit: to feed back into their AI training.
More useful questions are if they're using it for other purposes without opt-in or accidentally leaking it.
Until LLMs came along, most large-scale internet scraping was for search engines. Websites benefited from this arrangement because search engines directed users to those websites.
LLMs abused this arrangement to scrape content into a local database, compress that into a language model, and then serve the content directly to the user without directing the user to the website.
It might've been legal, but that doesn't mean it was ethical.
If I write a story a publish it freely on line to my website it’s not ’unlicensed’ in a way that means anyone had the right to yank it and republish it. Even though it’s freely available, I still own the copyright of it.
Similarly, we don’t say that GPL-ed code is ‘unlicensed’ just because it is available for free. It has a license, which defines very specific terms that must be followed.
Yeah, I’m complaining. We all agreed years ago to web indexing conventions still in practise today. No, no one is obliged to follow them but you can rest assured I’ll complain about them. There was a time when the web felt like a cooperative place, these days it’s just value extraction after value extraction.
Frankly I tried a samsung device which I would have assume is the worst here, and the promises are exactly the same. They show you two prompts, one for locally processed services (e.g. translation), and one when data is about to leave your device, and you can accept or reject them separately. But both of them are basically unverifiable promises and closed source services.