Huge new class action lawsuit filed by big publishers and authors against Google this week over AI training. It accuses Google of taking millions of books / articles provided to them for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books, and Google Scholar, and secretly using them to train LLMs. 🧵 1/4
The practice of AI companies secretly buying millions of old books (some vanishingly rare), scanning them for AI training, then destroying them, epitomises everything that is wrong with today's exploitative AI industry. 🧵 1/2
AI is Appropriated Intelligence. It is built on the work of the world's creatives - authors, artists, musicians, actors, voice artists, designers, journalists, directors - without permission. 'Appropriated' is a more useful description of the tech than 'Artificial' IMO.
99 authors just sued Anthropic, accusing them of pirating books to train AI. The lawsuit also names 2 Anthropic founders: Dario Amodei & Ben Mann. (It is established fact that Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated books, & that Ben Mann personally did some of this.) The lawsuits keep coming.
Reading the Papal Encyclical again, it strikes me that not only is there no mention of the theft of creative work behind AI - there is no acknowledgement that pre-training data includes people’s creative work at all. This is an unfortunate omission. 🧵 1/6
People talk a lot about speculative AI risks. But the theft of creative work to power AI isn’t a risk - it’s an actual harm that has already happened, is still happening, and needs to be redressed.
Hugging Face has just been sued for alleged copyright infringement for hosting & distributing copyrighted images, used for AI training. 🧵 1/3
Saying AI is just a tool in the creative process is misleading - because this isn’t the AI companies’ aim for it. The aim of the (big) AI company is to automate more are more. There is no hard limit at which point they will say ‘ok, that’s enough automated now’. 🧵 1/6
Today is a huge win for creatives around the world, as Australia makes it clear it will not bow to pressure from AI companies to legalise the theft of creatives’ work. 🧵 1/3
RouteNote, a platform that lets you distribute your music to Spotify etc., is automatically opting its users into an AI licensing deal with Meta. They say “This is your choice”, and give you 14 days to opt out - but lots of users will miss this email & therefore miss the chance to opt out. 🧵 1/2
