Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but commercial use of comments is prohibited by the HN Privacy and data Policy. So is creating derivative works (so technically a vector representation)
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou
> Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or in the Site, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or upload for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Site, use of the Site, or access to the Site.
> The buying, exchanging, selling and/or promotion (commercial or otherwise) of upvotes, comments, submissions, accounts (or any aspect of your account or any other account), karma, and/or content is strictly prohibited, constitutes a material breach of these Terms of Use, and could result in legal liability.
> Except as expressly authorized by Y Combinator, you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User Content (as defined below) that you legally upload to the Site.
> In connection with your use of the Site you will not engage in or use any data mining, robots, scraping or similar data gathering or extraction methods.You can anthropomorphize all you want, but AI is not a human and the law will not see it as such.
These modern brain prosthetics are darn good.
For a forum of users that's supposed to be smarter than Reddit users, we sure do make our selves out to be just as unsmart as those Reddit users are purported. To not be able to understand the intent/meaning of "for commercial use" is just mind boggling to the point it has to be intentional. The purpose is what I'm still unclear though
> I hired a company called OpenAI to do it for me.
>>> If it's OK to encode it in your natural neural net, why is it not OK to put it in your artificial one?
Sure and some people would want a "gun prosthesis" as an aid to quickly throw small metallic objects, and it wouldn't be allowed either.
I am not sure if it is that clear cut.
Embeddings are encodings of shared abstract concepts statistically inferred from many works or expressions of thoughts possessed by all humans.
With text embeddings, we get a many-to-one, lossy map: many possible texts ↝ one vector that preserves some structure about meaning and some structure about style, but not enough to reconstruct the original in general, and there is no principled way to say «this vector is derived specifically from that paragraph by authored by XYZ».
Does the encoded representation of the abstract concepts represent the derivate work? If yes, then every statement ever made by a human being represents the work derivative of someone else's by virtue of learning how to speak in the childhood – they create a derivative work of all prior speakers.
Technically, the3re is a strong argument against treating ordinary embedding vectors as derivative works, because:
- Embeddings are not uniquely reversible and, in general, it is not possible reconstruct the original text from the embedding;
- The embedding is one of an uncountable number of vectors in a space where nearby points correspond to many different possible sentences;
- Any individual vector is not meaningfully «the same» as the original work in the way that a translation or an adaptation is.
Please do note that this is the philosophical take and it glosses over the legally relevant differences between human and machine learning as the legal question ultimately depends on statutes, case law and policy choices that are still evolving.
Where it gets more complicated.
If the embeddings model has been trained on a large number of languages, it makes the cross-lingual search easily possible by using an abstract search concept in any language that the model has been trained on. The quality of such search results across languages X, Y and Z will be directly proportional to the scale and quality of the corpus of text that was used in the model training in the said languages.
Therefore, I can search for «the meaning of life»[0] in English and arrive at a highly relevant cluster of search results written in different languages by different people at different times, and the question becomes is «what exactly it has been statistically[1] derived from?».
[0] The cross-lingual search is what I did with my engineers last year to our surprise and delight of how well it actually worked.
[1] In the legal sense, if one can't trace a given vector uniquely back to a specific underlying copyrighted expression, and demonstrate substantial similarity of expression rather than idea, the «derivative work» argument in the legal sense becomes strained.
Data of non-european users who just click the "delete" button in their user profile? Completely different beast.
I've never been convinced that my data will be deleted from any long term backups. There's nothing preventing them from periodically restoring data from a previous backup and not doing any kind of due diligence to ensure hard delete data is deleted again.
Who in the EU is actually going in and auditing hard deletes? If you log in and can no longer see the data because the soft delete flag prevents it from being displayed and/or if any "give me a report of data you have on me" reports empty because of soft delete flag, how does anyone prove their data was not soft deleted only?
If anyone owns this comment it's me IMO. So I don't see any reason why HN should be able to sue anyone for using this freely available information.
At least that is what the TOS usually says. You can always get around that by making your own service or the like.
Think of it like visiting a foreign country. Like it or not, their rules apply one way or another. If they can enforce them, anyway.
I just don't understand the public outrage. Why is everyone so worried about this? I write stuff knowing it's publicly available, and I don't give a crap about HN or Reddit or whomever's claims to my writings.
As far as I'm concerned it's all public domain, so what if OpenAI trains on it? Why should that bother me? I just don't understand, it really just feels like a witch hunt, like everyone just wants to hate AI companies and they'll jump on any bandwagon that's against them no matter how nonsensical it is.
Why wouldn’t someone be mad about that?
(Violation of HN Terms & Conditions || Violation of copyright) = Potential penalty
So the equation still balances for them to not give a damn