cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41302017
The SoA is organising a day of protest against Meta following revelations of pirated books being used to train their large language models
On Thursday 20 March, The Atlantic broke the story of how Meta has used the Library Genesis (LIbGen) dataset, which is full of pirated material, to develop their AI systems.
The revelations detailed by The Atlantic come against the background of the recent government consultation into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and copyright and the #MakeItFair campaign which sees the UK creative industries fighting back against the proposed changes to copyright law, which would favour multinational tech companies, but irremediably damage the creative industries.
Piracy is not theft.
Let's be honest here, if the "product" someone sell it's data (video, audio, text, programs, ecc...) and you copy it without giving the creator a cent, that's pretty much theft. ALSO>>> Piracy itself it's not the issue. That's something that everyone (me included) do. And to some extent it's free advertising to the creator of the work, expanding by many times the market for his creations. Also OLD CONTENT's "piracy" it's basically a necessity for the digital preservation of many piece of media art.
BUT
AI training it's different. Without control it will eat up the whole market with cheap knockoffs and enshittificate everything.
I mean what Meta did hardly counts as piracy imo. They used the authors’ works without their permission to train their ai for profit. There’s a big difference between that and individuals pirating books to read and maybe making those books more accessible to others for free