Ethical AI Training Organization

This is a full-scale assault on creators' rights. Countries should stand up to the current US administration, and refuse to legalise the theft of creators' work to benefit AI companies. reuters.com/business/media-t…

Two huge music publishers just sued Anthropic, accusing them of conducting “a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale”. They also sued two Anthropic co-founders, Dario Amodei and Ben Mann. A reminder that the following are established facts already (they came out in another lawsuit): - Ben Mann downloaded the massive pirate library LibGen a few months after co-founding Anthropic (he had also downloaded it previously while at OpenAI) - Anthropic also downloaded other pirate libraries, eg PiLiMi - Claude 1 & Claude 2 were trained on pirated books

Hugging Face, which is being acquired by Nvidia for $13 billion, hosts and distributes large datasets of copyrighted books without permission. Its employees added a dataset of 7,000 books to the platform that were taken by others from Smashwords, an ebook site. The briefest of glances shows many of them contain clear copyright notices. I tweeted about this over a year ago, and the Hugging Face CEO suggested I file a report on their site. I did so. The report seems to have been ignored, and the dataset continues to be downloaded thousands of times every month.

ElevenLabs was just sued by voice actors for allegedly training on recordings of their voices without permission 👀 pacermonitor.com/public/case…

The reason it is so important that we introduce transparency laws over AI training data is that AI training is one of the only instances of mass copyright infringement that is mostly invisible to the rights holder. Usually, when someone uses your copyrighted work commercially without permission, you can see it happening. Maybe they modify your picture and use it on a magazine cover; maybe they pirate your film and resell it; maybe they steal your melody and use it in their own song. In each case, the infringement is out there in the open. That means (i) you are unlikely to miss it, and (ii) it is easy to hold the perpetrators accountable in the courts. AI training is different. It happens behind closed doors, and the result - the trained model - might not make the infringement obvious. Models trained on copyrighted work will sometimes output obviously copyrighted work, but, much of the time, the fact that your work has been used in training isn’t obvious. So people’s work has been copied and exploited for commercial purposes, but that copying is hidden. This is why we need new laws requiring AI companies to reveal the training data they use. Training commercial AI models on copyrighted work without permission is straight-up illegal in some countries (e.g. the UK), and there are strong arguments it is illegal in many cases in others (e.g. the US). But rights holders can't defend themselves under the law if the use of their work is kept hidden. The only reason these transparency laws aren't more widespread already is AI industry lobbying. Governments need to resist this, and introduce transparency requirements as a matter of urgency.

‘Tech companies believe in intellectual property, but not yours.” Great piece in The Atlantic pointing out that AI companies spend huge amounts of money simultaneously (i) defending their own IP and (ii) arguing that they can use other people’s for free. theatlantic.com/technology/2…

Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies. The UK government is considering upending copyright law to benefit AI companies. Don’t Steal This Book urges them not to. Apart from the list of authors involved, the book is empty, representing the effect the government’s plans would have on authors' livelihoods. We're handing out 1,000 free copies at London Book Fair over the next couple of days. If you’re there, pick up a copy! A huge thank you to the thousands of authors involved. Read more here: theguardian.com/technology/2… #DontStealThisBook

yet openai refuses to pay for the human art it trains on. curious

A senior product manager at Microsoft was telling users to train LLMs on Harry Potter. Does the piracy have no end