A spokeswoman for OpenAI declined to comment beyond pointing BI to a corporate blogpost from May, in which the company says it takes web crawler permissions “into account each time we train a new model.
The translation for this is do we stand to profit more than we stand to be punished.
They can't even be punished. robots.txt is just a convention, not a regulation. It's totally not enforceable.
The only legal framework we have is copyright law. Those who oppose this behavior will have to demonstrate copyright violation, and that may be difficult to do since the law hasn't caught up.
Yeah I know. But I wanted to point out that the comment in the article wasn't so much a real consideration as business risk analysis 101. Along with a healthy dose of corporate spin.
It's true robots is not regulation but if it's proven they ignore it on purpose it will be a major point in future lawsuits. And those are the next step.
Either scraping to transform the information in the page is fair use, and consent isn't necessary, or it is not fair use, and the absence of a robots.txt doesn't constitute consent. There's no middle ground where a robots.txt can mean anything.
They stand to profit if this is made into a real law.
Any regulation on AI just kill off their competition at this point. They are both lobbying for it and numerous proposed "anti-AI" laws have been their doing.
The game plan is to scrape, store and utilise as much data as possible regardless of conventions, best practice, license agreements etc until specifically regulated to stop.
At that point, a few early companies will have used vast swathes of data that any newly established company is banned from also using
I've yet to understand how the hell they get away with "I don't know how it works". Either figure out how it works or stop using it, shithead. It's software not magic beans.
There's lots of complicated fields out there, none of them get a pass for "I don't know how my drugs work" or "I don't know how my rockets work". That's absolutely ridiculous.
It’s just how machine learning has been since ever.
We only know the model’s behavior by testing, hence we only know more or less the behavior in relation to the amount of testing that was done. But the model internals has always been a black box of numbers that individually mean nothing and if tracked which neurons fire here and there it’ll appear just random, because it probably is.
Remember the machine learning models aren’t carefully designed, they’re just brute-force trained for a long time and have the numbers adjusted again and again whenever the results look closer or further away from the desired output.
If the models are random then we shouldn't be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications. If any other type of software told us that it's based on partially random results we'd say "get that shit out of here, I want my software to work first time, every time".
"Statistically good enough" works for some applications but not for others. If a LLM finds a formula that has an 80% chance to be the cure for cancer or a new magical fuel or some amazing new material that's cool, we're not going to look the gift horse in the mouth.
But using LLM to polute the web with advertising texts that are barely inteligible, and using it as a pretext to break copyright in the process, who does that help? So far the only readily available commercial application for LLMs has been to spit out semi-nonsense so that a bunch of bottom-crawling parasitic industries can be enabled to keep on pinching pennies and shitting up everything they touch.
Which, ironically, it will help them to hit bottom all the faster, so in a strange way it's a positive return, but the problem is they're going to take down a lot of useful things with them.
If the models are random then we shouldn't be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications.
That's not the reason we shouldn't be using them for anything other than generating lorem ipsum style text or dialogue for non quest critical NPCs in games.
The reason is that, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don't generate information, they generate information shaped sentences.
Specifically, an LLM takes a sequence of characters (not a word or text; LLMs have no concept of words, or text, or anything else for that matter; they're just an application of statistics on large volumes of sequences of characters; no meaning or intelligence involved, artificial or not)... as I was saying, an LLM takes a sequence of characters, pushes it through its model, and outputs the sequence of characters most likely to follow it in the texts its model has been trained on (or rather, the most likely after discarding the ones its creators have labelled as politically incorrect).
That's all they do, and they'll excellent at it (or would be if it weren't for the aforementioned filters), but that'll never give you a cure for cancer unless there already was one in their training data.
They take texts written by humans, shred them, and give you their badly put back together dessicated corpses, drained of any and all meaning or information, but looking very convincingly (until you fact check them) like actually meaningful or informative texts.
That is what makes them dangerous. That and the fact that the bastards selling them are marketing them for the jobs they're least capable of doing, that is, providing reliable information.
(And that's while they can still be trained on meaningful and informative texts written by humans — inasmuch as anything found on reddit, facebook, or xitter can be considered to be meaningful or informative —, but given that a higher and higher percentage of the text on the internet is being generated by LLMs soon enough it'll be impossible to train new models on anything but 99% LLM generated garbage, at which point the whole bubble will implode, as anyone who's wasted time, paper, and toner playing with a photocopier or anyone familiar with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” will already have realised... which is probably why the LLM peddlers are ignoring robots.txt and copyright laws in a desperate effort to scrape whatever's left of the bottom of the barrel.)
They are not random, that's the point. They're entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren't hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won't give you is information, except by accident.
If they were random (hidden or not) they'd be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.
The issue is that they're very not random, so much that there's no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking... and that very soon they'll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed "facts" we'll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.
Uh, we don't really know how our drugs work (especially the older ones). We have a vague understanding of their mechanisms, but we really don't know how they work. We don't even have a clear idea of what the structures of most drugs look like, and how they interact with their binding sites.
Luckily, we don't actually have to know how they work, to know that they work. Instead we use clinical trials and real world evidence to support their use.
(Fun fact: there's actually a branch of drug development called phenotypic drug discovery which actually does away with the understanding of the mechanisms altogether. )
I’m in the US so yeah…. Even if the current of future GDPR requires deletion I guarantee it’ll still be used in the US. I have no faith that any US company will follow rules like that. Any fines are just looked at as the cost of doing business.
I'd say they are pushing for regulations behind the scene because they know it gives them an instant monopoly.
They are already pass the door, they can afford to shut it behind them to own the room. Having to send checks to websites like Reddit and Getty in the future is a small price to pay.
They only kinda work but more importantly they need mass adoption to actually poison training data. Most people aren't going to add another step to their posts so probably the only way to mass adopt it is to have platforms automatically poison uploaded images. I wonder if reposts on a platform like that would start to have noticable artifacts in the images like jpeg but different
You mean that work that took open source software, closed sourced it and refused to release the source code and the poisoning only worked against one specific open source model (stable diffusion)? I don't think that's going to come riding to anyone's rescue.
I really enjoyed this article, thanks for sharing! Now when I lose track of what I seeded where I will say I'm practicing my field botany bee happy emoji
So, the unit was banned over a decade ago (when they where still a militia) and accusations of human rights violations where levied against it but never proven.
In 2015 the militia was absorbed into the Ukranian national guard after the Russians invaded Crimea.
Since the unit has shown they follow chain of command and are excellent warfighters defending Ukraine.
The US has vetted the unit and found no proof of the accusations levied pre 2015, and no issues since they are official military.
Seems like an elite unit is about to get access to some of the cool toys.
"...referring to the “Leahy Law” that prevents U.S. military assistance from going to foreign units credibly found to have committed major human rights violations."
At this point, it almost seems like Ukraine is happy to let Russia keep funnelling troops and equipment into Crimea, and just use it as a huge kill-box with nowhere to hide
Taking down the bridge was one of the things the German officers where caught discussing in that intelligence SNAFU.
They said the bridge was the size of an airfield and would take more than 20 Taurus missiles to take it out. And the Taurus missile was specially designed to bust high value reinforced targets. And it was not even clear if they where just talking about the car bridge only or included the rail bridge.
I hope the creative ukranians find a way to take out the bridge tough.
An additional point is that the bridge was also a main supply route for troops on the zaporizhia front, but the Russians have been working non stop to install a coastal railroad from Rostov to Mariupol.
Is there a source you'd recommend for keeping up with the progress of both sides? I appreciate the work that goes into this community but I assume it's painting a Ukraine friendly picture (as far as battleground conditions go) simply because it's in support of Ukraine.
Things like the coastal railroad you mentioned I wasn't even aware of and I assume that's because most of what I browse is showing the positive things for Ukraine instead of a more balanced/accurate picture of what the state of the war is.
Reporting from Ukraine: https://youtube.com/@rfu (Usual tactical updates from specific clashes among the front lines)
Jake Broe: https://youtube.com/@jakebroe (He is a cheer leader for Ukraine but has very broad subjects also regarding geopolitical happenings, just colored with hopeful thinking, I stick around for the general tone)
Military & History: https://youtube.com/@militaryandhistory (tactical & operational updates, he tries to be neutral and also updates on stuff like the railway line etc)
Anders Puck Nielsen: https://youtube.com/@anderspuck (Strategic and Geopolitical analysis from a military teacher of the Danish war college)
Perun: https://youtube.com/@perunau (periodically he has updates on the Russo Ukranian war, in between other very interesting narrated slideshows on the military, from a geopolitical and defense procurement perspective… neutral)
I'm up in northern Ontario near Sudbury ... and I've been driving around Timmins and Cochrane for the past few weeks. The forests don't have enough moisture ... we didn't get enough snow last year ... even my friends and relatives up north on James Bay are reporting a lot less water than years before. No one noticed that none of the James Bay communities reported emergency evacuations for anticipated floods this past spring like they normally do. There was about half the amount of snow here than last year.
It all means that the spring run off was a lot less than in previous years ... which means that our forests are already drying out and it isn't even warm or hot yet. As soon as that heat arrives, our forests are going to turn into tinder fire starter. Normally, we should have so much spring run off from our annual supply of snow and ice that it would keep our forests saturated long enough for them survive the summer heat and make it less possible for forest fires. Without that snow, we're doomed up here.
Take in a deep breath of fresh air everyone ... I hate to say it but I'm really worried that the whole north - everything north of North Bay, Sudbury and Thunder Bay - is going to go up in flames this summer. It won't be good for us in the north and it won't spare the south either because it will send clouds of smoke over the entire province.
Many started because forest fires can survive winter by burning slowly underground through root systems. Combined with the lack of snowpack this year, the melting snow didn't extinguish them -- leading to a record number of fires earlier than ever recorded before.
You can also order HEPA filters for those furnaces that filter smoke well. And if you have enough of those filters, you can tape one to the front of a box fan for a makeshift air purifier.
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