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Top-level
 Did you see this? The whole thing with "the stack". https://post.lurk.org/@emenel/112111014479288871 Some jerks did mass scraping of open source projects, putting them in a collection called "the stack" which they specifically recommend other people use as machine learning sources. If you look at their "Github opt-out repository" you'll find just page after page of people asking to have their stuff removed: https://github.com/bigcode-project/opt-out-v2/issues (1/2) 43 comments
So… what is happening here? All these people are opting out of having their content recorded as part of a corpus of open source code. And I'll probably do the same, because "The Stack" is falsely implying people have permission to use it for ML training. But this means "The Stack" has put a knife in the heart of publicly archiving open source code at all. Future attempts to preserve OSS code will, if they base themselves on "the stack", not have any of those opted-out repositories to draw from. Like, heck, how am I *supposed* to rely on my code getting preserved after I lose interest, I die, BitBucket deletes every bit of Mercurial-hosted content it ever hosted, etc? Am I supposed to rely on *Microsoft* to responsibly preserve my work? Holy crud no. We *want* people to want their code widely mirrored and distributed. That was the reason for the licenses. That was the social contract. But if machine learning means the social contract is dead, why would people want their code mirrored?  @mcc I have generally come to the conclusion that this is an intended effect. All the things you feel compelled to do for the good of others, in an ordinarily altruistic sense, are essentially made impossible unless you accept that your works and your expressions will be repackaged, sold, and absorbed into commercialised datasets. The SoaD line "manufacturing consent is the name of the game" has been in my head a lot lately.  @gsuberland @mcc One almost wonders if the end-game is to stop pulling and try pushing. Maybe instead of trying to claw back data we've made publicly crawlable because "I wanted it visible, but not like that" we ask why any of these companies get to keep their data proprietary when it's built on ours? Would people be more okay with all of this if the rule were "You can build a trained model off of publicly-available data, but that model must itself be publicly-available?" @mark @gsuberland In my opinion, a trapdoor like "okay, well if copyright doesn't apply to the training data you stole, your model isn't copyrightable either" is no good. The US Gov has already said GenAI images and text are not copyrightable. It doesn't help. The thing about generative AI is it inherently takes heavy computational resources (disk space, CPU time, often-unacknowledged low-wage tagging work). Therefore, as a tool, it is inherently biased toward capital and away from individuals. @mark @gsuberland If we say "AI is a new class of thing that is outside the copyright regime entirely", that is not a level playing field. The tool is designed in a way it inherently serves the powerful. "Machine learning models are inherently open" is the exact model I am afraid of— a world where copyright is something that applies to actors who have less than some specific amount of money, and anyone with more than that specific amount of money is liberated from it.  @mcc @mark @gsuberland Every x number of years we get business people trying to circumvent law by claiming the old laws don't apply, because computers.  @mcc @mark @gsuberland Exactly. Even if, say, GPT-4 wasn't covered by copyright, so what? Even if you could get it out of OpenAI's data centres in the first place, you couldn't run it with reasonable performance. And you *certainly* couldn't retrain it.  @datarama @mcc @mark @gsuberland there is one upside to forcing these models to be open and it's that it removes one of the, of not the primary, incentives in developing them in the first place. Yes, they could still sell its execution as a service, but if they lose control of the model itself, it becomes a considerably less profitable endeavor. @oblomov @mcc @mark @gsuberland How, though? Let's say that tomorrow, a judge rules that GPT-4 is not covered by copyright. What has actually changed? OpenAI isn't compelled to share it with anyone, and it's too big for anyone except large and wealthy corporations to actually do anything with. Sure, you couldn't get sued if you got a bittorrent of it somehow. But you're not getting a bittorrent of a 1.76 trillion parameter neural network anyway. @crzwdjk @oblomov @mcc @mark @gsuberland It is, but that's *still* beside the point. You can't actually do anything with it unless you have the resources of a large corporation. And my other point was that just because it isn't copyrighted, they can still keep it secret. @gsuberland @mcc This isn't why the AI craze has made me anxious, but it *is* why I have become terribly depressed. I like writing code and making various weird computer programs, and sharing them with people for mutual entertainment and occasional enlightenment. Now I can't do that without accepting that everything I do will be appropriated and commoditized by some of the most horrible people in tech, unless I do it in secret. And then what's the point? @datarama @gsuberland @mcc > And then what's the point? 💯 I'm feeling exactly the same way and I'm really struggling with it. Not just code but blog posts/tutorials as well. I've "lost" my main creative outlets. @asmaloney @gsuberland @mcc That's where I'm at too. And I have never been as depressed as I have this last year. For every other awful period in my life, I always had creative computer things to fall back on - literally, that has been how I kept from going too crazy in the entire story from "tiny bullied autistic kid" to "middle-aged guy holed up all alone during a pandemic". There was always coding and writing. @asmaloney @gsuberland @mcc Coding feels especially meaningless now. I try to convince myself that even after we all get fired and replaced with shitty AI, we could still do it for fun - but it's not fun when you know all you're really doing is providing more free training data for the same assholes who are actively working to destroy your life. @datarama "middle-aged guy holed up all alone during a pandemic" I feel seen (as the kids say these days). 😆 @asmaloney I sometimes think about how much that particular experience has coloured the rest of my experience of this bleak, bleak decade. I sat at home with nearly no social contact for 1½ years (except what came in through Teams), and even if I'm a bit of an introvert, I'm sure it made me a bit crazy. @datarama Me too. Really struggling to "dig out" of that and then all this other shit ("AI", wars, climate, politics, layoffs for even more profit, the shoddy state of software in general, etc.) just piles on. I think we're very much in the same situation, so you aren't alone. I hope you find some peace or at least some outlet to move things in a positive direction. I'm still lookin'... 😀 @asmaloney I've been looking for a long, long time too. And I don't know the way out. Every crisis is immediately followed by the next, without any of them being resolved. I am so tired.      Just 'cos it sounds fun & it's got OSS in it Sorry it's a bit late here & brain isn't up to working out a proper acronym  Please don't opt out all your repositories, leave the ones that didn't work or didnt compile or are full of security hole. @mcc yeah plus if the opt out for the stack stands it means they got everything in the past at least once so anyone with every version of it can combine them to get all the old stuff anyways. I HOPE that someone can get lucky and stop companies from shittifying everything, but it does kinda feel like this is the break in case of emergency that the clause in the gpl about adhering to future versions was made for  @mcc That's also basically how LAION made the dataset for Stable Diffusion. They collected a bunch of links to images with descriptive alt-text. (Are you taking time to write good alt-text because you respect disabled people? Congratulations, your good work is being exploited by the worst assholes in tech. Silicon Valley never lets a good deed go unpunished.) @mcc note that their page that checks if your repos are in “the stack” is case-sensitive. So be sure to enter your GitHub username exactly, otherwise they’ll claim your code isn’t present. |
Gregory's Server
…but wait! If you look at what they actually did (correct me if I'm wrong), they aren't actually doing any machine learning in the "stack" repo itself. The "stack" just collects zillions of repos in one place. Mirroring my content as part of a corpus of open source software, torrenting it, putting it on microfilm in a seedbank is the kind of thing I want to encourage. The problem becomes that they then *suggest* people create derivative works of those repos in contravention of the license. (2/2)