We Need to Talk About Artificial Intelligence...

Congress just released their report on the state of AI, and what they plan on doing about it. But are their plans actually good?

[TheBackyardChemist]

I think the correct response would be a "fine, so be it, you can train on unlicensed data, but your model weights are not protected by trade secret laws and any output is instantly public domain"

[Cinarbayramic]

ai wasnt going to replace us anyway, at least not by training on my messy code...

[handle_your_set]

Just last week, I asked my Aetna appointed therapist a very specific question.
“Is there any possibility that my session notes have been viewed by others outside these sessions?”
He hesitantly answered with a few departments.

I then asked if there is any possibility that my session notes are being used to train any large language model, ergo, AI?”

There was hesitation, then there was evasion, followed by..
“I don’t think so…”.
So yeah. Oh and he didn’t call me this week, as he has every week since we started.

[nojuanatall]

As a musician I quit putting my music on social media to keep facebook and others from stealing it and training AI on my work. It is hard to be an artist these days.

[nagi]

The fact that they have to take steps to prevent training data leakage means it's not anonymized at all. That's the end of the story as far as anonymization goes. (And it's inherent to the tech itself, like hallucination.)

[Bean-Time]

5:40 also in American schools you are forced to use Google drive and their stuff to turn things in. I am not sure how much of a choice it is when the alternative is flunking out of school. They could have put the human centipede clause, but is a third grader really going to know what the implications are, or have the power to reject it?

[bryanburns]

It isn't even just about reading the policy, you can read it, but if you disagree with it you still can't use the product. As you mentioned, I constantly feel pressured to either give up my information or I can't use most products today. Hardware included with all the devices tied to proprietary apps

[Noksus]

GDPR isn't just to tell users that cookies are being used. It is part of it and it requires websites to be opted out of tracking cookies by default because privacy should be the default. GDPR also has other aspects regarding data privacy other than just cookies. It is about conpanies needing to take care of the security of the personal data and it outlines the potential fines for ignoring data privacy.

[wizardadmin]

5:55 Because there are so few of those big tech companies, its idiotic that a company can decide to just exclude you from like 1/5 of the internet for violating policies they just came up with

[boredstudent]

Since it was referenced, no the GDPR doesn't really say you have to make cookie banners. It's just something many companies do because they are data greedy or uncertain about legal details. There are multiple justifications to collect data, e.g. it is required to provide the service or there is a directly connected business interest, like logging.
And the duty to inform is also passive, there needs to be a privacy policy in the legal fine print, no need for a popup or explicit consent.

[DaveCavalari]

With the new president being elon, there's no chance of congress passing anything that will block him and his billionaire buddies

[Eagledelta]

So how would a Law differentiate between a person being inspired/learning from a copyrighted work and AI doing the same thing via web scraping?

My biggest concern are that legislators are lazy and try to make catch all laws (or being lobbied into making things illegal that shouldn't be). I could totally see lobby groups pushing to make it illegal to learn from copyrighted work (how that would be enforced is beyond me) OR pushing to make all work someone does owned by an employer.... which would have implications for OSS Projects

[ZeAlfredo]

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

-- Joanna M.

[rudomg]

Worst even is these kind of policies about sharing data to third party are being done by health providers too; good luck trying to explain a doctor how dangerous is.

[nerdy_crawfish]

18:05 the sad thing is we haven’t been defunding education. According to NCES statistics inflation adjusted spending per pupil has been increasing since the 1970s and it now at an all time high of 15000 per student on average. Yet at the same time teacher pay has been going down when adjusted for inflation…. So we are spending more money but it’s not getting to the people on the ground where it would actually make the system better.

[kuhluhOG]

9:30 Fun fact: Not all countries allow you to surrender (or even transfer) your Copyright.

[paradox]

I think a new law should be created which says: "Any data used to training AI, must be consented by its owner in a separate document dedicated for that purpose only and must have a clear title that specifies that intent"

Also another one saying: "Access to a service can't require consent to using user data for AI training, unless it's an AI only service like ChatGPT"

[pav]

One thing I'm very concerned about is the state of the law over here in the EU.

Sure, Czechia has already declared that AI derived works are uncopyrightable by nature, but we still lack broader legislation applicable throughout the whole of the European Union.

...And that's despite this continent spearheading such privacy revolutions, like the world famous GDPR...

I really hope it can be ammended or something that in order for a company to use user provided data, they'd need an explicit, direct agreement from the user...

[johnpica]

Re: your closing statement about AI — I’m also unconvinced by generative AI LLMs. However, there are some great “AI” (I hate the word) models out there that are great at pattern recognition and quite useful.

For example, the healthcare space is currently being revolutionized by models (typically CNN’s) that can analyze ECGs or ultrasound recordings. The model will parse long recordings and flag abnormalities for a human (medical professional) to review. While the doctor can make the same diagnoses, the AI can parse a long recording very quickly, whereas it will take a person far longer.

So I think there are great usecases for targeted ML models, we just shouldn’t be pouring so much effort (not to mention energy?) into these generative LLMs, and instead be putting money & time into these more helpful specialized models.
I know you were talking about LLMs and the greedy things these corporations are doing with them, though.

[ImSquiggs]

Apples latest update forces their Voice Recorder app to make text transcriptions of all your messages. There’s no way to turn this off with any settings, it’s purposely excluded, and you can guess why — to illegally train their AI on your personal data without your knowledge or consent.

For anyone else that uses this app as frequently as I do and now hates the Apple corporation, I dug deep and found some angry nerds on a forum with a workaround, haha. Install the Japanese language on your phone and then force just that app to open in Japanese. Assuming you don’t speak Japanese, the app won’t be able to parse your speech and generate a transcript.

Insane I have to do this, but that’s the world we live in now. I think Apple needs a class action against them for this, among the other dozens that should be levied against other companies doing similar things.