this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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What OpenAI is doing is not piracy.
Whatever it is, it isn't theft
Also true. It’s scraping.
In the words of Cory Doctorow:
Molly White also wrote about this in the context of open access on the web and people being concerned about how their works are being used.
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
That's a great article. Isn't this kind of exactly what is going on here? Wouldn't bolstering copyright laws make training unaffordable for everyone except a handful of companies. Then these companies, because of their monopoly, could easily make the highest level models only affordable by the owner class.
People are mad at AI because it will be used to exploit them instead of the ones who exploit them every chance they get. Even worse, the legislation they shout for will make that exploitation even easier.
Our privacy was long gone well before AI companies were even founded, if people cared about their privacy then none of the largest tech companies would exist because they all spy on you wholesale.
The ship has sailed on generating digital assets. This isn't a technology that can be invented. Digital artists will have to adapt.
Technology often disrupts jobs, you can't fix that by fighting the technology. It's already invented. You fight the disruption by ensuring that your country takes care of people who lose their jobs by providing them with support and resources to adapt to the new job landscape.
For example, we didn't stop electronic computers to save the job of Computer (a large field of highly trained humans who did calculations) and CAD destroyed the drafting profession. Digital artists are not the first to experience this and they won't be the last.
In the US. The EU has proven that you can have perfectly functional privacy laws.
If your reasoning is based o the US not regulating their companies and so that makes it impossible to regulate them, then your reasoning is bad.
My reasoning is based upon observing the current Internet from the perspective of working in cyber security and dealing with privacy issues for global clients.
The GDPR is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't guarantee your digital privacy. It's more of a framework to regulate the trading and collecting of your personal data, not to prevent it.
No matter who or where you are, your data is collected and collated into profiles which are traded between data brokers. Anonymized data is a myth, it's easily deanonymized by data brokers and data retention limits do essentially nothing.
AI didn't steal your privacy. Advertisers and other data consuming entities have structured the entire digital and consumer electronics ecosystem to spy on you decades before transformers or even deep networks were ever used.