Category: Google’s Assault on Society

@CadeMetz @ceciliakang @sheeraf @stuartathompson @nicogrant: How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.

[This is a must-read, deeply researched, long form article about how Big Tech–mostly OpenAI, Google and Microsoft–are abrogating consumers trust and their promises to creators in a mad, greedy, frothing rush to some unknown payoff with AI. The Dot Bomb boom is dwarfed by the AI gold rush, but this article is a road map to just how bad it really is and how debased these people really are. Thanks to the destruction of the newsroom, only a handful of news outlets can deliver work of this quality, but thankfully the New York Times is still standing. How long is another story.]

OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest artificial intelligence systems….

OpenAI researchers created a speech recognition tool called Whisper. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. system smarter.

Some OpenAI employees discussed how such a move might go against YouTube’s rules, three people with knowledge of the conversations said. YouTube, which is owned by Google, prohibits use of its videos for applications that are “independent” of the video platform.

Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said….

Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its A.I. models, five people with knowledge of the company’s practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators.

Last year, Google also broadened its terms of service. One motivation for the change, according to members of the company’s privacy team and an internal message viewed by The Times, was to allow Google to be able to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other online material for more of its A.I. products.

The companies’ actions illustrate how online information — news stories, fictional works, message board posts, Wikipedia articles, computer programs, photos, podcasts and movie clips — has increasingly become the lifeblood of the booming A.I. industry. 

Read the post on New York Times.

 

It’s 1999 all over again…or maybe 2009. John Naughton on the long arm of Silicon Valley

Remember this?

No place for Joe

Professor John Naughton writes a column for The Guardian about technology and humans. This week he writes “Europe’s AI crackdown looks doomed to be felled by Silicon Valley lobbying power” which is a good bookend to my MTP post about Eric Schmidt bragging he got the UK prime minister to “take the bait” of the Biden Administration’s artificial intelligence executive order that Schmidt & Co. apparently wrote. Mr. Naughton addresses AI legislation in Brussels, the capitol of the European Union and “Silicon Valley’s” lobbying power. Given Eric Schmidt’s history in Brussels when he was at Google (and successfully led Google’s acquisition team that acquired the competition authority for the European Union) my suspicion is that it’s really Google or Schmidt’s investment arm that’s actually doing the lobbying but I take Professor Naughton’s meaning.

Professor Naughton tells us that:

Wednesday [tomorrow] will be a fateful day in Brussels, a faraway city of which post-Brexit Britain knows little and cares less. It’s the day on which the EU’s AI proposals enter the final stages of a tortuous lawmaking process. The bill is a landmark (first in the world) attempt to seriously regulate artificial intelligence (AI) based on its capacity to cause harm and will soon be in the final phase of the legislative process – so-called “trilogues” – where the EU parliament, commission and council decide what should be in the bill, and therefore become part of EU law. Big day, high stakes, in other words.

And almost certain to be knocked down by Mr. Schmidt & Co. given that they can waive their recently acquired US executive order around as bait. The stakes are very high given the expense of hiring the coders who train the AI with massive datasets. Which naturally means that companies like Google and Microsoft can’t “afford” to pay for millions of copyrights they use to train. Kind of like Spotify can’t afford to pay artists fairly given the rent on World Trade Center.

These systems are astonishingly expensive to train and build: salaries for the geeks who work on them start at Premier League striker level and go stratospheric (with added stock options); a single 80GB Nvidia Hopper H100 board – a key component of machine-learning hardware – costs £26,000, and you need thousands of them to build a respectable system. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are only about 20 firms globally that can afford to play this game. And they have money to burn.

It was looking for a while like Europe would set an example to the world for how to regulate AI. That is, before Eric Schmidt wrote Joe Biden’s executive order because we can’t wait around for Congress to act like those stuffy Europeans. Once that idea sank in, Schmidt got right on it.

Suddenly, the French, German and Italian governments combined to advocate less intrusive regulation of foundation models. According to these three musketeers, what Europe needs is a “regulatory framework which fosters innovation and competition, so that European players can emerge and carry our voice and values in the global race of AI”. And so the right approach is not to impose legal regulation on the (mostly American) companies dominating the AI racket, but to allow self-regulation through “company pledges and codes of conduct”.

Now, son of a bitch, where have we heard that before?

Read the post on The Guardian.

@MLC_US in the News: The fingerprints on a letter to Congress about AI @BrendanBordelon

[Editor Charlie sez: Politico uncovers hanky lanky by a lawyer for the Digital Licensee Coordinator actively working against creators. Nice to know an MLC board member’s Revolving Doorman may be giving the true indication of who butters the bread. This isn’t us saying it, it’s not MTP or the Trichordist saying it–this time, kids, it’s in Politico, the Billboard of the Washington smart people, aka your betters in the Imperial City.]

The message in the open letter sent to Congress on Sept. 11 was clear: Don’t put new copyright regulations on artificial intelligence systems.

The letter’s signatories were real players, a broad coalition of think tanks, professors and civil-society groups with a stake in the growing debate about AI and copyright in Washington.

Undisclosed, however, were the fingerprints of Sy Damle, a tech-friendly Washington lawyer and former government official who works for top firms in the industry — including OpenAI, one of the top developers of cutting-edge AI models. Damle is currently representing OpenAI in ongoing copyright lawsuits.

Read the post on Politico

Press Release: Copyright Alliance Statement on Maryland Court Granting Preliminary Injunction to Publishers in eBook Licensing Case

Washington, DC—February 17, 2022—Today, the Copyright Alliance released the following statement in response to the news that the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ruled in favor of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), granting a preliminary injunction that suspends the eBook licensing law at the center of the AAP v. Brian Frosh case:

According to Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid, “We are thrilled to learn of the Maryland court’s decision in granting a preliminary injunction in the case involving AAP challenging the state’s unconstitutional eBook licensing mandate, and in concluding that AAP has clearly satisfied the four preliminary injunction factors. We have believed all along that the eBook legislation would be preempted and that the court would reach the right decision, as it has clearly done. 

“The bill would have forced publishers to license their eBooks to libraries on terms that are determined by the state of Maryland (not by publishers). The court explicitly recognized that this sort of forced transaction between publishers and libraries would effectively strip publishers of their exclusive right under the Copyright Act to decide whether, when, and to whom to distribute their copyrighted works.

The court also made clear that forcing publishers to offer licenses for electronic literary products on terms that would enable public libraries to provide library users with access to the electronic literary product will not necessarily increase access to those products for library users over time, and that it is only through the protection of copyright law that books and other creative works may be generated and distributed at all.“In its decision, the court recognized that, ‘The economic philosophy behind the [Copyright] [C]lause…is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors’ and that ‘[C]opyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones.’ We agree with the court’s decision and offer our thanks for it coming to the right conclusion.”
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ABOUT THE COPYRIGHT ALLIANCEThe Copyright Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest and educational organization representing the copyright interests of over 1.8 million individual creators and over 13,000 organizations in the United States, across the spectrum of copyright disciplines. The Copyright Alliance is dedicated to advocating policies that promote and preserve the value of copyright, and to protecting the rights of creators and innovators. For more information, please visit https://copyrightalliance.org.

@ipwatchdog: Publishers Win Preliminary Injunction Against Maryland Law that Requires Licensing Digital Works to Libraries

[This is a big win for sanity against the Google & Co. shills at American Library Association as well as what sure looks like a proxy price fixing campaign leveraging the huge market controlled by librarians aka Big Tech’s human shields.]

Publishers scored a win yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland when the court granted their request for a preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement of the Maryland Act, which essentially calls for compulsory licensing of electronic literary works to libraries on “reasonable terms”. The law went into effect on January 1, 2022.

Read the post on IP Watchdog