#DataMining Scraping

[prismaticsaltedink]

-thinks about all the Undertale Gaster fans who are fans of a character who was CUT FROM THE GAME-

i love people with favorite characters who barely have any content. i hope you feast well on your three comically tiny bread crumbs tonight

[aratedfreyjablog]

Corner Talk about in Regards to PB's Announcement in Sharing Paid Contents

So, at this point everyone has read the recent announcement PrettyBusy has posted in regards to sharing ANY paid content. For the full announcement you can access it here but for those that just wants a sweet, small summary, it's essentially them taking legal action on anyone who:

Share any DATAMINE of PAID characters

Share any of the PAID characters FULL story, chats, etc.

So, they still allow players to share parts/bits and pieces of the paid content, just not all of it.

Though it seems like everyone can understand the whole business side of things, there's still confusion on the datamine aspect as in how is datamining is illegal, why is there legal action taken against datamining, etc.

First, I feel like people need to understand that datamining, itself, it NOT illegal. The problem is sharing datamines publicly on any social media. The reasons are for the following

Intellectual Property Rights: when companies release games, all of their contents are protected by trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property laws. When posting content that company didn't share themselves on their own social media page or to EVERYONE (both F2P and P2W), it's infringing copyright laws since the one sharing it wasn't the one to have produced/created the work or data (think of it reposting artists work without their permission but you're sharing a work that was put in by artists and game creators of the company without their permission).

Terms of Service Violation: Many software applications, websites, and digital platforms impose terms of service (ToS) that users must agree to before using their services. These ToS often prohibit activities like reverse engineering, data scraping, or extracting data in a manner that circumvents the intended use of the service. By datamining and posting content obtained in violation of these terms, you are breaching a contractual agreement between yourself and the platform, which can lead to legal consequences.

Security: there are certain codes and firewalls set up that many (if not ALL) game companies put in as a means to detect if there is any malicious activity happening within the system that could potential harm the players (e.g., hacking and extracting players' personal information). When datamining, most people aren't aware in what form these protective barriers are set-up, so when extracting contents from the game, rather than being seen as simply getting contents for one's amusement, it can be detected as a threat by the security system.

What I wrote are only snippets of the few reasons as to the legal concerns in sharing datamine contents. And despite for other fandoms, it's not as prevalent, game companies are starting to take up action in regards to datamining, some being obvious about it while others are being discreet.

However, if we were talking about solely on the announcement, it's understandable why it would bother players, especially F2P. For other games (not saying ALL or MOST), they do eventually make the paid content accessible at some point for F2P without having to make them wait for so long. However, PB isn't taking much initiative with that, where now they're adding characters from the Solomon Seals after 3 MONTHS while, for now, not letting F2P have ANY ACCESS to limited characters from Nightmare Pass. To top that off, previously PB had promised re-runs of events, which would've allowed newer F2P to have a chance to play the event and obtain resources/characters from it. But now they have their previous events accessible behind paywall, decreasing the likelihood for event re-runs to happen. As for P2W, players are literally paying to get the character and related contents related to said character so there shouldn't be much restrictions in sharing their paid content on public platforms in the first place (this is not to say they should disrespect PB and share everything though). This is without mentioning some of the promises that have already broken based on the announcement earlier this year and last month (?) (Main story drop every 2 months, Friendship System, Comics related to Cards being posted on their Social Media, etc.).

Hopefully PB will reconsider and address some of these issues with the upcoming event for Bethel and Belphegor dropping on 6/26.

[caffiend-queen]

@nildespirandum​ wow... I’ve hated AI with a passion for the shitty, fake “content” companies have spewed out using it, but this is ridiculous. And of course, they’ve carefully avoided teaching their scraping tech  to differentiate between copyrighted and non copyrighted material. 

I love it when anons/guests find my works and kudo/leave reviews, but given the new revelation that Elon Musk is using bots to mine AO3 fanfiction for a writing AI without writer's permission, my works are now archive-locked and only available for people with an AO3 account.

[candaru]

dear dataminers scraping my posts for private information to sell me targeted ads:

I don’t use tampons

please show me ads for small soft pokemon ledyba hanging plush with plastic hook thank you

[tangibletechnomancy]

What makes me sad about the AI art discourse is how it's so close to hitting something really, really important.

The thing is, while the problem with the models has little to do with IP law...the fact remains that art is often something that's very personal to an artist, so it DOES feel deeply, incredibly fucked up to find the traces of your own art in a place you never approved of, nor even imagined you would need to think about. It feels uncomfortable to find works you drew 10-15 years ago and forgot about, thought nobody but you and your friends cared about, right there as a contributing piece to a dataset. It feels gross. It feels violating. It feels like you, yourself, are being reduced to just a point of data for someone else's consumption, being picked apart for parts-

Now, as someone with some understanding of how AI works, I can acknowledge that as just A Feeling, which doesn't actually reflect how the model works, nor is it an accurate representation of the mindset of...the majority of end users (we can bitch about the worst of them until the cows come home, but that's for other posts).

But as an artist, I can't help but think...wow, there's something kind of powerful to that feeling of disgust, let's use it for good.

Because it doesn't come from nowhere. It's not just petty entitlement. It comes from suddenly realizing how much a faceless entity with no conscience, sprung from a field whose culture enables and rewards some of the worst cruelty humanity has to offer, can "know" about you and your work, and that new things can be built from this compiled knowledge without your consent or even awareness, and that even if you could do something about it legally after the fact (which you can't in this case because archival constitutes fair use, as does statistical analysis of the contents of an archive), you can't stop it from a technical standpoint. It comes from being confronted with the power of technology over something you probably consider deeply intimate and personal, even if it was just something you made for a job. I have to begrudgingly admit that even the most unscrupulous AI users and developers are somewhat useful in this artistic sense, as they act as a demonstration of how easy it is to use that power for evil. Never mind the economic concerns that come with any kind of automation - those only get even more unsettling and terrifying when blended with all of this.

Now stop and realize what OTHER very personal information is out there for robots to compile. Your selfies. Your vacation photos. The blog you kept as a journal when you were 14. Those secrets that you only share with either a therapist or thousands of anonymous strangers online. Who knows if you've been in the background of someone else's photos online? Who knows if you've been posted somewhere without your consent and THAT'S being scraped? Never mind the piles and piles of data that most social media websites and apps collect from every move you make both online and in the physical world. All of this information can be blended and remixed and used to build whatever kind of tool someone finds it useful for, with no complications so long as they don't include your copyrighted material ITSELF.

Does this mortify you? Does it make your blood run cold? Does it make you recoil in terror from the technology that we all use now? Does this radicalize you against invasive datamining? Does this make you want to fight for privacy?

I wish people were more open to sitting with that feeling of fear and disgust and - instead of viciously attacking JUST the thing that brought this uncomfortable fact to their attention - using that feeling in a way that will protect EVERYONE who has to live in the modern, connected world, because the fact is, image synthesis is possibly the LEAST harmful thing to come of this kind of data scraping.

When I look at image synthesis, and consider the ethical implications of how the datasets are compiled, what I hear the model saying to me is,

"Look what someone can do with some of the most intimate details of your life.

You do not own your data.

You do not have the right to disappear.

Everything you've ever posted, everything you've ever shared, everything you've ever curated, you have no control over anymore.

The law as it is cannot protect you from this. It may never be able to without doing far more harm than it prevents.

You and so many others have grown far too comfortable with the internet, as corporations tried to make it look friendlier on the surface while only making it more hostile in reality, and tech expands to only make it more dangerous - sparing no mercy for those things you posted when it was much smaller, and those things were harder to find.

Think about facial recognition and how law enforcement wants to use it with no regard for its false positive rate.

Think about how Facebook was used to arrest a child for seeking to abort her rapist's fetus.

Think about how aggressive datamining and the ad targeting born from it has been used to interfere in elections and empower fascists.

Think about how a fascist has taken over Twitter and keeps leaking your data everywhere.

Think about all of this and be thankful for the shock I have given you, and for the fact that I am one of the least harmful things created from it. Be thankful that despite my potential for abuse, ultimately I only exist to give more people access to the joy of visual art, and be thankful that you can't rip me open and find your specific, personal data inside me - because if you could, someone would use it for far worse than being a smug jerk about the nature of art.

Maybe it wouldn't be YOUR data they would use that way. Maybe it wouldn't be anyone's who you know personally. Your data, after all, is such a small and insignificant part of the set that it wouldn't be missed if it somehow disappeared. But it would be used for great evil.

Never forget that it already has been.

Use this feeling of shock and horror to galvanize you, to secure yourself, to demand your privacy, to fight the encroachment of spyware into every aspect of your life."

A great cyberpunk machine covered in sci-fi computer monitors showing people fighting in the streets, squabbling over the latest tool derived from the panopticon, draped cables over the machine glowing neon bright, dynamic light and shadows cast over the machine with its eyes and cameras everywhere; there is only a tiny spark of relief to be found in the fact that one machine is made to create beauty, and something artfully terrifying to its visibility, when so many others have been used as tools of violent oppression, but perhaps we can use that spark to make a change Generated with Simple Stable

[jbird-the-manwich]

honestly I think we should all start calling it Meta hear me out:

It’s multiple projects. In multiple consumer-critical fields.

Under one umbrella. 

They are all steaming trash fires of privacy violations, user data consent violations, and datamining. Primarily scraped from facebook data but also from other sources users may not have consented to / were unaware they had consented to.  

The big social media companies are all centralized, privately held corporations. 

All of these are scarier than the associations people consider when hearing “facebook”. which is that safe blue familiar space many associate primarily with family and friends and giggles and hearts. I will use their stupid new name. But i’m using it against them.

[thrown-away-opinions]

Artists when artists are copying & distributing art from companies for their own use and profit without paying them: 'Lol, theft removes the original, this doesn't. Copying art is not a crime! yo-ho yo-ho!' Artists when companies are copying & distribuying art from artists for their own use and profit: 'What! Collage is a crime! You wouldn't download a car!' Good to see that the God of Irony still has a job!

I was going to write something about this subject too, but I got hung up on that gofundme thing.

Up front, I think there is some legitimate complaints about artists not wanting their shit scraped and fed into an algorithm. That's not an unreasonable demand. Datamining is out of control on the internet. There needs to be way less of it.

But also... All this bitching and moaning about ethics and morality is hollow as fuck. The piracy thing right up front. How many scanlated manga or fan-subbed shows you think the average seething artist has read/watched? How many movies did they pirate? How many ads have they blocked? How many streaming service passwords shared? How many second-hand things have they purchased? How many college textbooks downloaded? How many programs have they cracked and used for years without ever paying a sub fee? How many little things have they shoplifted? How many immoral and unethical things they've done without ever making up for it?

Short version is blatant "rules for thee, but not for me!!" bullshit. It is an ethical nightmare that some programmers have in some way appropriated raw data from something made by someone else because they, the artists, deserve payment and royalties for their art being viewed in any way they don't approve of, even if it's just some ephemeral fragment of something they made once, did not license, did not copyright, did not commercialize in any way.

Every other artist and employee who worked on and produces all the shows and products and services doesn't deserve payment because... uhh.. because late stage capitalism or whatever!!

It's a double standard that doesn't hold up to a moment of scrutiny. Some of this hysterical bullshit would even be forgivable if it were just about not being happy about having their work used in a way they don't approve of. Instead, they had to go with this moronic, exaggerated ethics angle, they had to pool their money to try and get the US Government involved. All this constant wailing and gnashing about losing jobs and work when nothing has actually changed and no one is making 6 figures yearly on an AI Art patreon. No one is losing commissions to some now world famous prompt expert who charges even more money.

We've long accepted piracy as an unavoidable aspect of the digital age, but suddenly that's not okay because it might (but not actually) impact some freelancer/indie artist's ability to get work that they either aren't losing because of AI (remember that the global economy is falling apart), or they might lose jobs that they don't have, they aren't trained for and/or aren't pursuing anyways.

But you know what else is kinda fucked about all of it? Most of these artists wouldn't be where they are today without technology and software advancements. Do you have any idea how many artists would be fucking hopeless without all the custom photoshop and CSP brushes they downloaded for free (and never credited the creator)? Do you know how fucked these people would be without all the built in color correction settings and filters and gradient maps? They can't even imagine drawing in procreate without all the built-in tools for correcting their sloppy-ass linework. There's SO MANY successful and highly paid webtoon comics out there that wouldn't be where they are today without the CSP asset store allowing them to drop in 3d background assets and pre-set pose and hand guides.

These whiny fucks are up to their eyeballs in technology that props up their entire profession/hobby, but they are screaming at the top of their lungs because someone downloaded a booru or scraped pinterest to feed into an AI Training algorithm.

tl;dr - They're a bunch of immoral hypocrites who badly want to dress up their impotent outrage as some kind of meaningful, ethical catastrophe.

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[officialralsei]

all the lore about bad programming is fucking hilarious considering that toby fox isn't really the best programmer irl (example: punch card exploit in undertale) and while it's functional, ive heard it (undertale) described as "a game held together by a lot of love and duct tape" and considering the amount of glitches in deltarune, id say the same thing about it as well.

(not to insult toby's programming, of course, he did a wonderful job bringing his awesome games to life)

that is to say, rouxlster bad programmer real and supported by evidence irl

a/n: yes that's the origin of the lore! I'm not a programmer myself, and so a lot of this stuff flies over my head, but my partner is a programmer/speedrunner and I've seen dataminers talk a lot about the code in utdr, so I have a very basic understanding of common gaming glitches and the flaws in deltarune's code lol. held together by love and duct tape is a good way to put it.

i actually think rouxlster is WORSE at programming than toby fox is in this blog's canon. but luckily for him the blogverse explicitly relies on narrative rules more than simple coding rules, so he's scraping by. don't worry worstie at some point fate has decreed that you'll perfectly replicate toby fox's code. you just need to put in more effort

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[cargopantsman]

And this while mess cycles back to the age old question of "what is art?" and we're running into the same "problem" when expressionism or abstract art were coming to their peaks.

While I can be sympathetic about the fast and loose training algorithms that scrap image data feom wherever they will, that's a problem that has existed on the internet since image hosting has been viable and to a degree we have to except that intellectual property theft is just a thing.

Because it's always been a thing. That's why we have the saying "good artists create, great artists steal." This isn't news.

And I recall a post (that I can't link because tumblr search is... what it is) that did a great view on whether there was really a difference between AI generated art versus human generated art because we do both go through the same process of absorbing what has come before and try to output something unique, but even that unique thing is going be an echo of what came before.

Which isn't a bad thing per se since we're always grappling with "truth" but always need to recontextualize it for our lived, contemporary experiences.

While I may be against AI art since it is generally some kind of overarching conglomerate trying to do datamining... there is an end user case where someone can type a prompt into a bot and "create" an image, an experience, that at least is close to what they imagined and see it manifested.

But from the other end of technical skill, we all fell in love @nostalgebraist 's Frank. I can't even fathom what went into creating and maintaining that autoresponder, but I know many of us, even if hesitantly, took that AI in as one of our own, and all she did was scrape tumblr posts and respond in kind over time. As we all do.

And I think that is art.

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

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[tangibletechnomancy]

What frustrates me about The Discourse about AI art is that everyone feels the need to have An Opinion...and no one is willing to look into the conversations that have been going on for DECADES surrounding the relevant issues, or the cases that set precedent for what we can do here going back CENTURIES.

Let me lay out two very important things here:

The dataset ethics issue is more of an issue of digital privacy than copyright.

The labor issue has been seen MANY times throughout history; we can look to MANY other times new tech has shaken up a job market for precedent before AI even STARTS being used on large commercial projects.

Point #1 is true because, I have said before and I will say again, image synthesis is not collaging. It is not copy-pasting. It does not composite images in the dataset. It doesn't even save the images. It looks for patterns in the pixels and tries to recreate similar patterns from random or semi-random noise. This is why it often sucks at anatomy without human guidance - it recognizes that the word "hair" usually corresponds to a pattern that usually goes near a pattern that corresponds to a "head", it recognizes that "hands" usually have a certain pattern of repeating light and shadows, but it doesn't understand the intricacies of where those things belong or how many times a pattern might repeat. This is why images of architecture often have impossible geometry - it understands the shapes that these things tend to take; it doesn't understand the logic of what connects to what. People can use it to plagiarize - they can, intentionally or otherwise, force a result that is overfitted to a specific piece of data in the set - but to say that's ALL it does is comparable to the asinine claim that ALL referencing is plagiarism, because SOME people will just straight up trace or recreate a full piece that already exists, sometimes even by accident. (And some people - not all, not even most, but some who claim plagiarism, whether from AI or traditional art, are just...really? Do you really think you are the only person who has ever drawn, say, a pink fairy sitting under a purple luminescent mushroom, gazing at a full moon in the upper left, composed with the 1/3s rule? Do you really?)

And the thing is, I agree that the kind of broad data scrapes that have been used to create most AI models should be reserved solely for scientific curiosity if they're used at all, and I respect anyone who doesn't want to touch image synthesis until that issue is resolved. The only reason it doesn't bother me too much to play with it myself is that...unfortunately, we're all interacting with much worse as we speak. Ever heard the word "spyware?" If you're old enough to know it, notice how you stopped hearing it when Facebook normalized making literally the majority of the internet into spyware?

You can't really use the internet while wholly blocking Google, and their evils are pretty well documented. (Remember when we rolled our eyes at their internal "don't be evil" slogan? And how deeply unsettling it was to then watch them REMOVE that while ramping up aggressive datamining?) Amazon made Alexa to harvest your data to sell you shit more effectively. If you have a smartphone, Google or Apple or both are harvesting your data for all kinds of much more malicious purposes than making pretty pictures. Twitter uses your tweets and browsing patterns to force you to interact with people you will hate because negative emotions hold your attention better than positive ones and they want that sweet sweet advertiser money from your constant engagement; this was the case even long before Elongated Muskrat took over. Spotify Wrapped and knockoffs thereof are ~fun tools~ that...normalize just handing data about some pretty personal things over to anyone who dangles a shiny novelty in front of you made with it. It's used for invasive surveillance and policing, and Facebook's for-profit datamining even ended up being a tool of election interference - had it not been for them we might not be in nearly such a bad state with the rise of global fascism.

Image synthesis is one of the most harmless and even potentially BENEFICIAL things to be created as a result of this disturbing norm.

The fact is, small artists: copyright law may protect you a little, sometimes, but it wasn't made for us (and yes, I say "us", because even if you don't count my partially AI work as art, I do traditional art too, guys). It was made for Disney and their ilk. It is designed to protect corporate interests, not artistic ones. That notwithstanding, the copyright angle is a weak one in the first place - it's easy to argue that, because the process is transformative enough, and the dataset is large enough and abstracted enough from anything it was derived from, AI training on online art would fall under fair use, and it is only individual misuses that would constitute infringement. It's especially easy to argue this when you recognize that, at this point, that's more where the corporate interest lies, and remember who the laws are made for!

Digital privacy, on the other hand? The right to your own data? The right to be forgotten? The need to have regulations on where robots can and cannot crawl, and for what purposes? THAT is a critical conversation that we need to be having here, and if everyone with An Opinion on AI art focused their energy there instead of mostly just misinformed screaming about the sky falling and Art Dying And Society Degrading (which is HORRIFYING to hear from leftists in knowing its history as a fascist talking point), we could probably get some MAJOR good done.

Furthermore, even if someone ruled that AI training doesn't constitute fair use under copyright law, that won't stop big companies from using AI - Disney has PLENTY of frames of animation to feed a model to make something entirely their own. So do most animation studios. I have even been in talks with people trying to work on a 100% public domain AI model - the biggest concern about it is that if we complete and finalize it before the labor side of the issue is being worked around properly, it will EMBOLDEN unethical use in industry by getting rid of the potential legal complications.

So let's talk about the labor side and recognize - this isn't the first time new tech has threatened to make major changes to the way something is done in industry, potentially resulting in workforce downsizing. It won't be the last. Honestly, as a person who's been both machining and doing mixed media art since I was a kid (and sometimes both at the same time), I find it deeply disheartening how many people have not cared about this side of the issue until it was certain art jobs that might get automated...and even more frustrating how people refuse to look to past cases for how the harms of new tech shaking up employment have been mitigated.

What we could and should be fighting for is a government program to compensate and optionally retrain employees who were laid off due to automation (ANY automation, not just in art!!), as well as independent workers who see a drop in income due to increased market saturation. We can do this. We've done it before.

We could and should also be fighting for UBI - this will be harder, but it's more popular now than it ever has been and some places are even TESTING it while the internet watches; it is not nearly as much of a pipe dream as it once was.

What's NOT going to help anyone is devaluing the labor of new automation tech operators - that INCENTIVIZES the corporations to adopt it FASTER where possible, and treat both new and existing employees WORSE. "I could replace you with a robot; you're employed out of the goodness of my heart" is one of the most common justifications for abusing and underpaying employees in relevant positions. Big media companies already rely on crunch at poverty wages; they're only going to get worse about it with AI tech because "oh you're just pushing buttons, what do you mean you can't do that for 20 hours at barely minimum wage, how lazy can you get?" if we continue this line of thinking. However, if we recommend and enable new automation operators - in all industries - to UNIONIZE before their work and thus their mistreatment even starts, it will make the transition a hell of a lot easier on both new and existing workers.

Tl;dr: It's great that we have a lot of people concerned about artists' labor rights and tech transparency now PLEASE LEARN YOUR HISTORY AND DIRECT YOUR ENERGY WHERE IT IS NEEDED INSTEAD OF ASSUMING YOU KNOW EVERYTHING FROM A FEW SENSATIONALIZED ARTICLES I BEG OF YOU

[nientedal]

Of course it isn't "designed to rework" anything. Generative AI is generative. It generates its own new output based on user inputs and whatever parameters and restrictions you (JSTOR) build into your tool-- but it generates that new output in ways humans can understand by training on & pulling from vast datasets of stolen information. It builds sandcastles all its own, every single grain of which was stolen from a person. There is no ethical workaround for this. We were not asked, we were not paid; neither OpenAI nor their contemporaries gave us the opportunity to have our words and works excluded from their datasets.

Generative AI is trained on hundreds of billions of points of scraped data encoded into "tokens" comprehensible to its algorithms. To give you an idea of scale, GPT-3's text datasets included 3 billion tokens from Wikipedia. 86 billion came from three other sources, and a whopping 410 billion tokens came from the 501(c)(3) nonprofit CommonCrawl, which completes Nutch crawls on a regular basis. I believe that until recently, the petabytes of data in CommonCrawl's sets and archives (which are available to the public despite containing copyrighted work, under fair use claims) were mostly used for research, corporate datamining, and what I'll call "targeted" app development-- people using specific subsets of the data. GPT-3 and GPT-3.5's training data, however, is all-encompassing, and it is being used to generate enormous profit across multiple industries for OpenAI Global. You, JSTOR, are not profiting directly off of this-- I assume-- but you're using GPT3.5 Turbo at least in part, so OpenAI very definitely is.

(Anyone remotely familiar with fair use should immediately see the problem here. Not with JSTOR specifically, to be clear. But overall.)

I understand the attractive opportunities arising as this technology develops. I understand JSTOR'S need to stay competitive. I understand perfectly why JSTOR is developing this tool, and based on a brief review of your FAQ, it seems like it is designed to work with a minimum of hallucinations. If I'm reading between the lines correctly, you're basically trying to make this into the conversational search engine many people already believe LLMs to be. Well done. You also reassure that you will not replace humans. Good!

But that's only part of the puzzle. The use of generative AI at this time is unethical at its core. You do seem committed to using AI responsibly, as you claim...but to use something like this ethically simply is not possible using current tools and methods. The data in the sets upon which OpenAI's tools are built and trained does not belong to them; to use it for profit is fundamentally unethical. I am sorry.

I would remove "ethical" from future assurances. Replace it with "conscientious," perhaps. Or "as ethically as possible." I do not know that I would call that better, since it's a fundamentally empty reassurance, but at least it would no longer be a factual impossibility.

Like I said, I fully understand why you're developing this tool. I'm not going to tell you you shouldn't. But I will tell you flat-out: You can "commit" as hard as you like to building your sandcastle ethically. You won't make the sand any less stolen.

Why is JSTOR using AI? AI is deeply environmentally harmful and steals from creatives and academics.

Thanks for your question. We recognize the potential harm that AI can pose to the environment, creatives, and academics. We also recognize that AI tools, beyond our own, are emerging at a rapid rate inside and outside of academia.

We're committed to leveraging AI responsibly and ethically, ensuring it enhances, rather than replaces, human effort in research and education. Our use of AI aims to provide credible, scholarly support to our users, helping them engage more effectively with complex content. At this point, our tool isn't designed to rework content belonging to creatives and academics. It's designed to allow researchers to ask direct questions and deepen their understanding of complex texts.

Our approach here is a cautious one, mindful of ethical and environmental concerns, and we're dedicated to ongoing dialogue with our community to ensure our AI initiatives align with our core values and the needs of our users. Engagement and insight from the community, positive or negative, helps us learn how we might improve our approach. In this way, we hope to lead by example for responsible AI use.

For more details, please see our Generative AI FAQ.