Technology

Moral of the story never do anything as an individual by your name. Do it as a multi-billion dollar company with a battalion of lawyers and have fall guys. At minimum have an LLC controlled by a trust in someone else's name doing anything actionable in court.

Remember companies are people even though they can't get arrested and giving large sums of money to politicians is free speech, not bribery or corruption.

Aaron Swartz was ~~prosecuted~~ murdered for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

So scraping means any harvesting of data now?

We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people's unstructured HTML.

In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.

Did he pay a fee to the king and visit his inauguration like Zucker?

The anti-piracy efforts of the RIAA and MPAA (and the publishing houses and...) are still pretty robust, but that didn't stop any of the big AI companies from using gigatons of copyrighted material as datasets to train their LLMs. It's why when you ask them to generate an image featuring Winnie The Pooh, they all know what you're talking about.

But the big companies absolutely did not get permission to do this. Nor did anyone give permission to allow for the recent jailbreaks by AI task systems to hack into other companies. If that were any singular human (not of the owner class) they'd face charges under the CFAA. But since it's a massive company with an army of blue-haired lawyers, nothing was done about it, and the companies actually bragged about their AIs escaping containment.

Extinction by AI takeover is far more interesting than extinction by global drought.

Obligatory FUCK SPEZ

RIP Aaron.

About a year ago I saw coverage on IA getting reamed for the cases they were dealing with, there were many takes during then and it turned out the way it did (and continues to) but my take on it basically extends from what the govt did to Swartz, in that IA had to deal with all of that almost entirely on their own and take on the mental turmoil, meanwhile Meta et al not only got away and continues to get away with it but in fact are now partnering up with other mega corps doing the same shit, for profit. It dead set almost feels like they're mocking us by going this far with these ventures, they're like "Yeah the govt moralized and killed someone for the same shit we're getting govt contracts for and ADVERTISING ON OUR OWN PLATFORMS, gonna do something about it? Mad?".

All of this amounts to the most open and shut case of "if you have enough money, you can get away with anything, objectively anything"

Because Swartz didn't have a legion of expensive lawyers at his disposal. ☹️

Fuck what they did to that guy. We should have revolted then.

Aaron is definately on my wall of heroes. I think much of our leadership does not understand how despite there being billions of people on the planet they are not just fungible commodities. That we lose every time and stunt our growth. I by no means mean we should have more populationa as what we have is to much for the biosphere. Its about smartly using what we have than thinking you can just replace a person with another.

If only we could figure out the difference between these two things, we could learn so much! Alas, it is unknowable.

Obviously fuck Meta, but the difference is the publishing. Scraping and copying for personal or business use is a civil matter. And machine learning from unlicensed material is also fine - as long as the material isn't "memorized" and an AI model can't reproduce it.

Aaron bravely published the papers which is a criminal matter. That is why I believe copyright and IP law is the real theft, they take down copies for people to learn from.

There are many many millions of people who read and learned from pirated textbooks and who use those skills to do things. Who watched pirated amines or comics use that to learn how to draw.

Basically we should not be siding with the unethical side of IP law just to oppose AI corporations. They can afford to buy the books and media, and a simple purchase will do. And they can afford the lawsuits. And they will figure out the memorization problem, so that AI models learn but not memorize (which is only happens in like 1% of the cases and only when you specifically ask for something "just like that").

China (so far) is saying that the AI models they produce should be open weight and be available to all people on earth. So if we have any issues it should be with the monopolization of AI models that concentrate this new developing immense power of AI in the hands of a few plutocrats. Which the IP laws might actually help them with.