Post #4054207

Replies (1)

• @Azuaron@cyberpunk.lol 2026-07-22 19:48

  @mo@mastodon.ml First of all, that's not what they said. They said "I have downloaded" data that "you were probably expecting to be yours", as if the speaker of the poem hacked into a secure system and stole data. Second of all, "copying" is how the internet and computers work, you can't get around that. Thirdly, now you're making a copyright argument--which, again, the poem is not--and a copyright argument is never complete without Fair Use, and every Fair Use analysis of training AI models concludes--often begrudgingly--that training AI models is Fair Use, including the courts that have ruled on it. I also can't, personally, come up with a way to revoke Fair Use for AI that wouldn't revoke Fair Use for a ton of excellent Fair Uses, because it turns out that "AI" is a marketing term, not a technical one, and at the end of the day there's a lot of excellent and fair uses for "scraping data off the internet" and "programmatic remixing of data". A while back, there was someone on Twitter that I think even built a non-profit out of screenshotting ads on nazi sites like The Daily Stormer, and contacting the corporations in the ads saying, "Hey, do you really want your name and logo right next to 'Women shouldn't be able to vote' and 'Cops should kill more black people'"? Most corporations didn't, obviously, and this effort cost The Daily Stormer and similar sites lots of money. Millions of dollars. Obviously, The Daily Stormer hated this, and would never provide consent for it. I believe this effort was primarily a manual one; people would load up the target sites, take screenshots, and share the screenshots around. Let's say I wrote an application to automate this. With an embedded browser, it loads up the sites, takes screenshots, and then does it again and again, varying browser agent, referrer, and IP address with a VPN so it doesn't get blocked and it gets different ads. Then, I can analyze the images to eliminate duplicates, automate determining the brand in the ads, and create mosaics of brands next to harmful content, and then I shared those mosaics in the same way that the screenshots were shared on Twitter to shame ad companies off the sites. What I just described is a more direct copyright violation than what LLMs do, with less Fair Use protection because the end result contains directly copied portions of the copyrighted work. If you think I shouldn't be allowed to do that, then we fundamentally disagree about copyright law in general, and there's probably no point in this conversation; you literally want to get rid of Fair Use. If you think I should be able to scrape and collage The Daily Stormer as part of a hostile campaign against them, how do you craft a law that outlaws "AI" "training", but still lets me do that? Because, again, "AI" is a marketing term, not a technical one, and the law has to be technical. Finally, copyright law is primarily law wielded by large corporations against individuals. I am a programmer and an author; I spend all day every day creating copyrighted work. I have never been helped by copyright law, only harmed by it. I don't know about you, but I don't want to hand Disney--or my employer--yet another club to bash people with.

  Open ##4054208