That is such a weird and misleading way to put it. There was no consent in the first place. Take YouTube for example. Google did not consent to the videos it hosts being used by OpenAI. The uploader certainly did not ever consent to their face, voice and content being used to train models either.
Google was training on all of YouTube back in 2012 - https://slate.com/technology/2012/06/google-computers-learn-...
I'm also not saying I _support_ ToS
Consent requires the person knowing what they are consenting to. How many people do you think know that posting your face on Facebook consents to using your face to generate photos? Your voice to create voice generators?
What about when someone posts a group photo or video and despite you not having an account that the same rules apply? What about all the photos created by others and uploaded by those with no ownership or rights to the photos in the first place? They can't legally give away the rights.
Then we also have to consider that the environment has changed and the terms changed under people. You may have signed up for Facebook and knew they were going to use your data to sell ads and do some analysis. But you didn't know AI was coming (let's be real, no one knew even at the time of AlexNet. It didn't become clear in tech groups until maybe 2016/2017). Sure, the agreements might "be the same" but people always contextualize things. In 2012 you might not care that Facebook "owns" your voice because you know they have to host the file, and contextually it is "just over legalize". But in 2024, now the context is that this trains a model that can replicate your voice and this means something VERY different.
I think there's this common attitude of "Oh, well you agreed to the terms" as if this makes the terms fair, reasonable, or okay in the first place. It doesn't account for the reality of the situation. It just further legitimizes this world where a person is legally culpable for not having domain expertise. News flash, we live in a specialized world and you can't be a domain expert in everything. It doesn't account for the fact that there is often no alternative and there is serious cohesion at this point. Unfortunately, not all the choices in your life are up to you and many are social (and many of those are idiotic and can force you into decisions nearly no one in the group wants[0]) and not all the choices you make ultimately come down to you. If it was up to me everyone would be using Signal to communicate with me and no one would have bought Apple products when they made their devices unupgradable and charged more for _increasing_ your disk space than it would cost to buy 1.5 drives in the first place. But also, thank god that everything isn't up to me because I'm also a fucking idiot.
No, I don't think there was consent this whole time and as time progressed we amount and capacity you have had to consent to has decreased. And dismissing it (the fact that consent is not binary) just makes the problem exponentially worse. Not to mention all the dark patterns which I can do a whole other rant about.
[0] Prime example: the American presidential race. The vast majority of people would rather have neither Trump nor Biden running. The vast majority of people do not want a gerontocracy but will vote for one of the two candidates because what other choice do they have? People __could__ agree to to vote for a third party, but doing so gives such a strategic disadvantage that people are rational in attempting to choose from the options provided to them (see primaries).
I think we've been able to see this coming for many, many years.
You may think this now, but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that you didn't believe this in 2012 and even 2015. Be careful to not rewrite history. It's an easy thing to do.
Arguably this is just not consent, plain and simple. There could be no reasonable expectation for a person to believe they are agreeing to this. Whereas uninformed consent, I'd argue, is more like how people were agreeing to giving away their data but do not actually understand how the data is taken and used (let's be real, this includes even a lot, if not most, tech people).
I can’t see that argument holding up in court. You’re using a definition of informed and consent that are rather novel.
Funnily enough, you can actually use LLMs to make sense of these things. We're more empowered than ever to process legal text. It used to be that your only option was to consult somebody with legal training. Which of course isn't something a lot of users would do.
In any case, you are using a moralistic argument in a legal context. That's simply not how the law gets interpreted in court rooms. It might motivate politicians to write new laws though. Which then get interepreted in court rooms. But given the complexity of the matter at hand, the outcome might not be something that is a net positive. In fact that is extremely unlikely.
That being said - the general crux of the third-party doctrine (at least in the United States) is that information told to another party has no expectation of privacy. That seems to apply to a vast amount of 'user generated content' on the internet. Someone decided to utilize someone else's megaphone to post into the commons and now expects to retain some ownership. It's hard to have it both ways "just because someone else noticed."
Unfortunately this also extends to general artistic styles. If you, as an artist, continues to create in a consistent style and someone else notices you don't have a lot of recourse when some entity is able to recreate a similar style.
On a technical side this seems similar to your server responding to any incoming request with a 200 status and some content (LinkedIn v HiQ). In this case a user-agent asked (was it a person? scraper? AI training process?) and you gave it to "them".
I guess we end up in the position where if you don't want to train AI then don't post your content publicly.
I truly detest this phrase, but: “Citation Needed”
Alice (content creator) told Bob (YouTube). Bob told Carol (OpenAI et al.) when Carol asked Bob for a video.
This is only true in the absence of an agreement between Alice and Bob that Bob won't tattle.
#1 It's not all that certain AI training is fair use. There could be significant damages if it is found to not be fair use.
#2 "We're going to steal your shit even if you won't give us consent to do that" is a bad idea. We're already seeing the practical results: People stop/reduce posting their works to the clearnet. What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued? Pay a subscription fee to every single Patreon page?
And the big one, #3: It destroys public support for your technology, which is essential if you want to survive the oncoming government regulation.
Look at the public response to various tech companies stopping their AI rollout in europe over EU regulations. Varying from "Yes, this is exactly what we asked for" to "Good fucking riddance".
And it will get only worse yet. Europe's privacy authorities are already issuing quiet statements that the scraping of social media posts, such as is done for AI data collection, is not legal under the GDPR. (The law's pretty clear on this, it doesn't matter that it was "posted publicly", you're not allowed to use personal data like that) There's already whispers of going after the LLMs themselves, as they contain and continue to process personal data as well.
AI needs public support, and the lack of consent is slowly bleeding it dry.
> What's your scraper bot going to do? Create an account on every 'private' forum and immediately get sued?
* In the case of big IP holders (e.g. media companies, news organizations) this is just obtaining consent. The only fun quirck is that OpenAI's purchasing of this drastically lowers the "AI training is fair use" claim by proving the existance of a market.
* In the case of platforms like Reddit, it just kicks the problem one layer down. The platform does obtain "consent" through it's ToS. (Beware that this consent is legally weak, and won't protect your ass from anything outside copyright) But users will still see it as "stealing" and may flee the platform.
There's still a notable shift away from the clearnet.
I want to add nuance. I don't think it is the "move fast and break things" mentality that creates all the shit, but that that there is no "time to clean up, everybody do your share" mentality to complement it. Doing things often creates a mess, and doing hard things often creates a bigger mess. You can't make a fancy meal without dirtying a bunch of dishes. But are we seriously not hiring "dishwashers"? Creating a mess is unavoidable, and certainly it shouldn't be too large of a mess, but the dishes are piling up and we can't hide it anymore. It isn't a linear problem because the mess compounds and the mess itself generates more mess. We won't refactor. We won't rewrite. So we just have patchwork on top of patchwork. That's enshitification.
We also have a status quo that we sprint into a sprint and try to move as fast as we can but only measure how fast we're going by looking at how far we moved in a quarter. There's no long term measurement because "that's too hard." But this is like trying to circumnavigate the world and choosing to walk. You'll make progress every day and more importantly, __measurable__ (and easily measurable) progress. But you could spend 11 months building a fucking Cesna and still beat the person that could walk on water. You need to move fast (like the Cesna), but to move fast requires also slowing down. Who is willing to slow down?
I think most people don't have a problem with people using public data to do research or similar activities. That people wouldn't be up in arms if OpenAI scraped all of YouTube, trained on it, proved internally that they could do cool stuff with it, AND THEN either started to generate their own data for training or started to purchase data. Even though this would still be costly to YouTube and be a weird ethical ground (like getting a "free trial" (or theft) of the data and pay only if it works).
As someone with anxiety, I can assure you, it is not a good idea to constantly be rushing around chasing everything that needs to be solved. You just make more messes because you sloppily "fix" the issues, trying to move onto the next. The trick is to fight your own mind, slow down, triage, and solve anything that isn't a literal fucking fire with calm and care, no matter how much your own mind wants to convince you it is an emergency. But when everything is an emergency, nothing is. And that's the problem. We created an economy based on a business strategy that is functionally equivalent to an untreated and severe anxiety disorder.
It's really interesting. Ever since I started publicly stating that I've removed all my works from the public web because there is no realistic method of defending myself against AI scrapers, I've been encountering a surprising number of people who say they've done the same thing.
I don't know how far this will go, but at least I know I'm not alone.