[HN Gopher] Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online ...
___________________________________________________________________
Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI
Author : rntn
Score : 43 points
Date : 2023-07-03 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| euroderf wrote:
| Are they using the contents of GMail email messages ?
| gAI wrote:
| I'm not mad about it. Have at. Certainly AI can only benefit from
| my deep insights and hard-earned wisdom. I can see why some
| people are mad, though.
| damnesian wrote:
| I remember the first time I really understood Google was using my
| "private" comms to sling ads at me. The writing on the wall
| seemed clear then. I just didn't know what the future endpoints
| were.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| from new T&C
|
| For example, we may collect information that's publicly available
| online or from other public sources to help train Google's
| languageAI models and build *products* and features like Google
| Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities. Or, if your
| business's information appears on a website, we may index and
| display it on Google services.
|
| https://policies.google.com/privacy/archive/20221215-2023070...
| paxys wrote:
| _Not_ scraping the public web is a competitive disadvantage,
| since OpenAI and others are definitely going to do it even if you
| don 't. Unless there are new laws regulating it or some court
| setting a precedent under existing copyright laws, you can just
| expect all publicly viewable data online to be constantly
| training AI models.
| [deleted]
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They have more than enough data for good models. Training good
| models that work is the hard part it seems.
| klyrs wrote:
| Well that's an interesting reversal. Back when I was a kid,
| websites would have terms of services that their users were
| expected to follow. Now, web scrapers have terms of...
| consumption?
|
| Time to make a webring of Markov generated garbage to feed the
| bots...
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Did Google say they aren't respecting robots.txt files?
| tpxl wrote:
| At this point, is there a way to protect your content from being
| thrown in the blender other than to not make it available
| publicly?
| jstarfish wrote:
| Make it commercially unpalatable. Nobody will touch 4chan.
|
| Have different service levels. Authenticated users get the real
| thing (rate limited), anyone else gets a dynamic Markov-
| generated version with subtle errors deliberately introduced.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Perhaps something like AGPL but for text/documents?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Licenses alongside public content won't work because the
| reason people feel free to train is a legal theory that it
| does not require permission.
| spaced-out wrote:
| No. The US Supreme Court has ruled that a website cannot use
| TOS to prevent other companies from scraping publicly available
| data, even if they're doing so to directly harm the people who
| posted that data (citation below).
|
| Basically, a company called HiQ was scraping public LinkedIn
| data to sell a service where they would inform companies if
| their employees were looking for a job on LinkedIn -- because
| LinkedIn will hide info from your employer for obvious reasons.
| LinkedIn sent cease-and-desist, then later sued by lost.
|
| https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
| ozim wrote:
| I think of making something like Wikipedia where I write loads
| of useful stuff an throw in a handful of dick pics - not mine -
| but you get the general idea.
|
| There are also more sophisticated attacks like even single
| pixel attacks that one can place in his content.
|
| I expect if I put enough counter AI attacks in my websites
| media/text they will notice that and put me on their exclusion
| list.
|
| Well they are first to pull asshole move so won't feel guilty.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I rather like how you're thinking here. I think I need to
| look into how I can throw the biggest monkey wrench possible
| into the data AI scrapers get from my websites. Make the
| bastards pay.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 1. Win a lawsuit establishing that training AI is not fair use,
| or
|
| 2. Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it
| is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to use
| it to train AI.
|
| 3. For images, using on of the AI-poisoning techniques and
| publicizing that fact may encourage people to exclude your
| content from training sets; OTOH, it may backfire, especially
| against people looking specifically to defeat the AI poisoning
| technique in use.
|
| Otherwise, those operating under the theory that training AI is
| Fair Use will have no reason not you use the content for
| training AI.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Put it behind a click-wrap agreement that provides that it
| is provided to the user in exchange for an agreement not to
| use it to train AI.
|
| Such a thing is only as good as your ability to enforce it,
| though. Are you in a financial situation that allows you to
| afford to sue Google? I'm not.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I was rather explicit that the list was designed for
| dealing with "those operating under the theory that
| training AI is Fair Use".
|
| If your threat model is "those only concerned with what
| they can be forcibly compelled not to do, after evaluating
| the capacities of each content supplier to resist", things
| are different.
|
| Which category Google falls into on this is a debate I'm
| not interested in engaging in.
| landemva wrote:
| Set a price list for this type of usage, then pick a
| jurisdiction friendly to your cause of action.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Your ability to pick and choose jurisdictions is pretty
| limited (at least in the US). But ignoring that...
|
| Having a price list doesn't change the fact that if
| someone ignores your demands, your only recourse is to
| sue them. If they have a bigger warchest than you, and
| are sufficiently motivated, they can drag the whole thing
| out until you run out of money and can't pursue the
| lawsuit anymore.
|
| This is why such an approach is of limited value in terms
| of protecting yourself against companies that are sitting
| on a ton of money.
|
| In memory of Don Lancaster, he made a point about this
| sort of thing: many companies would rather spend $100,000
| on legal fees than stoop to paying you a $10,000 fee or
| royalty.
| [deleted]
| JohnFen wrote:
| I've been looking into this pretty closely, and I've yet to
| find a good solution. The best approach I can find is to set up
| webserver rules to block connections coming from specific ip
| addresses, but that's just a whack-a-mole game I can't win.
|
| So, for now, all of my public websites are no longer publicly
| available until/unless I can find a solution.
| asdadsdad wrote:
| What's the point of having it public for humans but not for
| machines?
| redeux wrote:
| In principal I think it's less about humans vs machines and
| more about individuals vs corporations. It's one thing to
| want to do contribute to the global knowledge base. It's
| another thing entirely to monetize that knowledge wholesale
| and that's what AI companies seek.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > It's one thing to want to do contribute to the global
| knowledge base. It's another thing entirely to monetize
| that knowledge wholesale
|
| You mean like a search engine scraping content and putting
| ads by results?
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| To be honest if it's publicly available, I'm sure the odds that
| a human looking at your content and copying it vastly exceeds
| the odds of an AI utilizing it in its entirety. These are
| billion parameter models.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Depends on how niche what you do is relative to the quantity
| of information available on it.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Does this include google photos and google docs?
| gochi wrote:
| Neither of those are end to end encrypted, so yes.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| I'm thinking, what if someone would add in their blog's terms of
| use something like "the content on this blog is not for machine
| learning purposes"? Could they later sue Google if their site
| gets scraped by Google for LLM training?
| omoikane wrote:
| If those terms of use were machine readable, this would have
| been equivalent to something like robots.txt, but for AI.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34324208
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35886288
| anotherman554 wrote:
| A contract requires an agreement between two parties. I don't
| see how writing "the content on this blog is not for machine
| learning purposes" alone shows Google has agreed to your terms.
| spaced-out wrote:
| The US Supreme Court has already said no, see the case of
| LinkedIn vs. HiQ.
|
| https://www.fbm.com/publications/what-recent-rulings-in-hiq-...
| pmontra wrote:
| How's that Google's privacy policy? It even applies to entities
| that have no relationship with Google. It's about those other
| entities' privacy policies (Google might ignore them) or a
| statement about Google's business practices.
| slyall wrote:
| Weird to see people get worked up about scraping the web for "AI"
| when search engine companies have been scraping the web for over
| 25 years.
|
| 99% of the time people's complaints about "permission" and
| "information accidentally made public" are the same arguments
| they have been using about search engines for years. Most of them
| have court cases even.
| anjel wrote:
| The pirate in me dreams of the conversations I could have with
| libgen.ai
| flangola7 wrote:
| GPT-3 was trained on it, so just use ChatGPT
| aerhardt wrote:
| Try scraping at scale from them, I'm sure they would graciously
| take it as a fact of life in the open internet. You wouldn't hear
| a word from their lawyers, no sir!
| costco wrote:
| Serpapi.com has been around for several years now, in fact if
| you pay extra they agree to indemnify you against lawsuits by
| Google regarding scraping (as far as I can tell none have
| happened yet).
| intesars wrote:
| I recently started scraping internet for my own work.
| Unfortunately the sad part of using public data for AI is there
| is no references to the original work.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-03 23:02 UTC)