Not for Machines to Harvest: Data Revolts Against A.I.
Not for Machines to Harvest: Data Revolts Against A.I.
Kit Loffstadt has been writing fan fiction for more than 20 years, during which time she has explored alternative universes for “Star Wars” heroes and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” villains, and she has made her stories available for free online.
But in May, Ms. Loffstadt decided to cease uploading her creations after she discovered that a data business had cloned her stories and fed them into the artificial intelligence system that was the foundation of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot. She buried her writing behind a secure account because she was embarrassed.
Ms. Loffstadt was also instrumental in the planning and execution of a protest against artificial intelligence systems that took place a month ago. She, along with dozens of other authors of fan fiction, published a flood of irreverent pieces online in an effort to overwhelm and confuse the data-collection platforms that feed writers’ work into artificial intelligence technology.
“We each have to do whatever we can to show them the output of our creativity is not for machines to harvest as they like,” said Ms. Loffstadt, a voice actor from South Yorkshire in Britain who is 42 years old.
As a fever over the technology has captivated Silicon Valley and the rest of the globe,
one group that is currently launching revolts against A.I. systems is fan fiction authors. This is just one of many groups. Authors like Paul Tremblay and the actor Sarah Silverman, as well as social media sites like Reddit and Twitter, as well as news organisations like The New York Times and NBC News, have all taken a stance in recent months against the practise of artificial intelligence “sucking up” their data without their permission.
Their demonstrations have taken on a variety of shapes. Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting some websites that publish A.I.-generated content, while businesses like Reddit want to charge for access to their data. Writers and artists are locking their files to protect their work or are boycotting certain websites.
At least ten lawsuits have been brought against artificial intelligence businesses so far this year, alleging that the companies trained their algorithms on the creative work of artists without obtaining their agreement. This past week, Ms. Silverman, together with the writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, and several other parties for using their work without permission.
A recent realisation that information found online, such as tales, artwork,
news articles, message board posts, and photographs, may have enormous value that has not yet been exploited is at the core of the uprisings.
The most recent iteration of artificial intelligence, known as “generative A.I.” for the text, images, and other content that it generates, is constructed on top of sophisticated systems such as massive language models, which are able to produce prose that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans. These models are taught to answer people’s questions by being exposed to vast amounts of data from a variety of sources so that they can generate comedic and poetic content on their own.
OpenAI’s GPT-3 is an artificial intelligence system that will be published in 2020. It covers 500 billion “tokens,” each of which represents a component of a word that can primarily be found online. Some artificial intelligence algorithms encompass more than a trillion tokens.
The method of “scraping” the internet has been in use for quite some time and has been widely disclosed by the businesses and nonprofit organisations that engage in the practise. However, the firms that controlled the data did not comprehend it very well and did not view it as an especially critical issue. This began to change in November, when ChatGPT was introduced to the public and additional information about the underlying A.I. models that powered chatbots was made public.
Brandon Duderstadt, the founder and chief executive officer of Nomic,
an artificial intelligence business, stated that “what’s happening here is a fundamental realignment of the value of data.” Nomic was founded in 2010. “In the past, the conventional wisdom was that the only way to derive value from data was to broadcast it publicly and sell access to it. Now, the idea is that you should keep your data secret because you can derive a significantly greater amount of value from it if you use it as an input to your AI.
It’s possible that the protests about the data won’t amount to much in the long run. Tech behemoths with deep pockets like as Google and Microsoft already possess mountains of confidential information and have the means necessary to licence even more of it. But when the period of information that is easy to scrape draws to a close, smaller A.I. startups and organisations who had intended to compete with the large businesses may not be able to gather enough content to train their systems because this era is coming to an end.
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ChatGPT, according to a statement released by OpenAI, was trained using “licenced content, publicly available content, and content created by human A.I. trainers.” The statement continued by saying, “We respect the rights of creators and authors, and we look forward to continuing to work with them to protect their interests.”
In a statement, Google revealed that it was participating in discussions over how publishers would be able to manage their material in the future. “We believe that everyone benefits from a vibrant content ecosystem,” the business stated. A request for comment was sent to Microsoft, but they did not react to it.
The data uprisings began the previous year,
just after ChatGPT became a sensation on a global scale. After their code was used to train an AI-powered programming assistant, a group of programmers filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in November. The programmers claimed that the firms had violated their copyright by using their code in the training process.
Getty visuals, a firm that sells stock photos and films, filed a lawsuit against Stability A.I. in January, alleging that the start-up had used copyrighted photos to train its algorithms. Stability A.I. is an artificial intelligence company that develops visuals based on text descriptions.
Then, in the month of June, a legal firm based in Los Angeles known as Clarkson filed a 151-page proposed class action suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The petition described how OpenAI had obtained data from children and claimed that web scraping violated copyright law and constituted “theft.” On Tuesday, the company sent Google with a lawsuit that was quite identical to the last one.
According to Ryan Clarkson, creator of Clarkson, “the data rebellion that we’re seeing across the country is society’s way of pushing back against this idea that Big Tech is simply entitled to take any and all information from any source whatsoever, and make it their own.” “The data rebellion that we’re seeing across the country is society’s way of pushing back against this idea that Big Tech is simply entitled to take any and all information from any source whatsoever,”
