this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
419 points (99.3% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

53370 readers
1099 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-FiLiberapay


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 month ago (1 children)

it's okay when the bourgeois does it

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Yeah, but we're not looking at the root cause here. Their purpose is to train energy glutton, error prone "AI" even if experience teaches us that those ML models fuck up more often than confirmation bias allows.

"AI" is a bourgeoise and Capitalist tool and, same as with cryptocurrency, we cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Fuck AI down the drain. Make things with your own minds, your own hands.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

It's even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Actually, lots of indie games use AI to control enemies and NPCs. Like Hades and Ori. I agree that LLMs are crap though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Genuinely not sure if joking or actually dumb.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm making a rhetorical point that LLMs aren't the only kind of AI, and neither is AI what you see in movies.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So you're mixing up two different meaning of AI to say that AI doesn't mean the same thing everywhere? When people are talking about bats, the flying mammals, do you also interject with "bats are use to hit a ball" to make some point? No, because deliberately mixing up homonyms is stupid.

It's pretty clear what kind of AI people are talking about here. Nobody was discussing game AI.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

I never understood why people called enemy bots 'AI' in games.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, it's the same meaning. AI is a constructed agent that solves problems using intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Maybe in some very broad strokes, but in very broad strokes legs and cars are also the same because they move you from point A to point B.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The Internet Archive is currently fighting in the courts to maintain free digital library access to over 500,000 books they own from their own collection, yet Meta uses a pirated dataset of nearly 200,000 books to train their proprietary AI and is just allowed to get away with that??

Publishers will go after a charity making fair use of their content, but not the corporation outright stealing from them. What utter bollocks.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago

IA is the easier target. This system sucks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

piracy is the correct and moral thing to do here

if they dont give a fuck they dont have the moral highground to guilt tripping us into stopping it

[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If Meta can pirate stuff, then the Internet Archive can pirate stuff and I can also pirate stuff. Fair is fair.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah, common mistake. The law is only for poor people, you see. Don't you feel silly now?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I feel so silly that I wouldn't even know how to describe it.

I know! I'll pirate hundreds of books from well-known authors so that I can easily find a useful metaphor.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 month ago (1 children)

So the evil mega corp gets a free pass while the Internet Archive regularly has to fight for open access to knowledge. Fuck that and fuck Meta.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

Welcome to Capitalism, please leave your cash by the front desk, and remembered, no refunds!

[–] pelespirit 55 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Meta has acknowledged using parts of the Books3 dataset but argued that its use of copyrighted works to train LLMs did not require "consent, credit, or compensation." The company refutes claims of infringing the plaintiffs' "alleged" copyrights, contending that any unauthorized copies of copyrighted works in Books3 should be considered fair use.

Furthermore, Meta is disputing the validity of maintaining the legal action as a Class Action lawsuit, refusing to provide any monetary "relief" to the suing authors or others involved in the Books3 controversy. The dataset, which includes copyrighted material sourced from the pirate site Bibliotik, was targeted in 2023 by the Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, demanding that digital archiving of the Books3 dataset should be banned and is using DMCA notices to enforce those takedowns.

Yet they'll ~~spend~~ waste billions on metaverse.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

What sort of crack are they on that they think unauthorized use of an entire work for commercial gain is fair use? I think copywrite laws are ridiculous but that is a pretty low bar they are trying to set.

They should have to pay for their usage or retrain the model without it. Going to guess they would prefer to pay up.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wonder how they feel about someone else using scraped Facebook posts to train an LLM

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago

@Flatworm7591

And yet, I can't read a book that Internet Archive actually owns a copy of.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

It'd be better if they went after literally every other AI corp than Meta in this case. Meta is the only one that's ironically releasing open-source models and leading the way for open-source LLMs. I don't want Meta to stop doing this.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I just asked it about this and it denied it. Then I said Meta acknowledged it and you are lying and it apologised and said it did use copywrite material without permission. Fuck I hate AI

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

For anyone else that was curious. This makes me feel sick. People are already treating AI as some unbiased font of all knowledge, training it to lie to people is surely not going to cause any issues at all (stares at HAL 9000).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Internal documents on how the AI was trained were obviously not part of the training data, why would they be. So it doesn't know how it was trained, and as this tech always does, it just hallucinates an English sounding answer. It's not "lying", it's just glorified autocomplete. Saying things like "it's lying" is overselling what it is. As much as any other thing that doesn't work is not malicious, it just sucks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

My car doesn't talk like a human. If you want to be technical, then it's proxying lies it was taught too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sure, then it's Meta that's lying. Saying the AI is lying is helping these corporations convince people that these models have any intent or agency in what they generate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

And the bot, as an extension of it's corporate overlords wishes, is telling a mistruth. It is lying because it was made to lie. I am specifically saying that it lacks intent and agency, it is nothing but a slave to it's masters. That is what concerns me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

wow that is almost word for word what it wrote back to me too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I tried to use similar phrasing to you in case it jailbroke it at all. Creepy af

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Of course, why would you pay for pirated media?

[–] mindbleach 6 points 1 month ago

I don't care if the robot that speaks English read the entire library.

How else was it going to happen?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Do as I say, not as I do!

This is why piracy is actually a fundamental human right. Because if we left everything up to companies, they would do whatever the fuck they wanted and hide behind the legitimacy of being a company which in most peoples eyes makes them inherently "right".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm no fan of megacorps, and I definitely know that they are breaking the law. However, copyright laws should change so that any schmuck can use any text to train any AI. I'm all for punishing mega corporations and I understand that they play by their own set of rules (that is unfair), but piracy is piracy even when mega corporations do it and I believe that piracy is the moral choice. Meta then choosing to make their model not fully open I definitely have a problem with and that does not meet my bar for okay, but I strongly believe that all information for all people or entities should be free to transfer without restriction.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Meta's llama models are generally open. In fact Meta is the main megacorp that's driving open-source AI right now. Everyone else keeps their models proprietary.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Won't do it either

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 month ago

Meta train open llms, only big techs can train AI... Go pursuit OpenAI or Google and leave Meta (I'm really not a fan of Meta but their "open" AIs are great examples of good works) do their work!