Microsoft and OpenAI were sued on Wednesday by sixteen pseudonymous individuals who claim the companies’ AI products based on ChatGPT collected and divulged their personal information without adequate notice or consent.
The complaint [PDF], filed in federal court in San Francisco, California, alleges the two businesses ignored the legal means of obtaining data for their AI models and chose to gather it without paying for it.
“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint says. “They systematically scraped 300 billion words from the internet, ‘books, articles, websites and posts – including personal information obtained without consent.’ OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”
Really hate how everyone is flipping their lid about large language model datasets and output, when the actual focus should be models specifically built for use against the general public. It’s like flipping out at someone for reading a letter you put on the bulletin board to their robot while ignoring the person looking through your personal thoughts with a machine built specifically to read your mind.
Maybe they’ll succeed and hinder progress in AI, so we fail to develop sufficiently advanced AI before our world collapses from environmental failure. At least the advertisers will know how to push our buttons the right way to get us to buy something we don’t need.
I wonder if this will go differently from Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc. ChatGPT likely qualifies as “transformative”, but I’m uncertain if it qualifies as a “public service” or not given that it has a paid tier. How privacy/personal information ties into this should also be interesting.
without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law
I didn’t know there were laws on this aspect of data harvesting. Don’t get me wrong, there should be. I just thought the US was completely asleep on this (hi EU users!). Can anyone shed more light on this?
Edit: uh, wrong thread… I don’t know if I should delete this, but I’ll strike it out for now…
You know, thinking about it… The only Google service I really use personally is YouTube without logging in and with ad block. My work email is through gmail, and I have some gmail accounts that I haven’t killed, but I self host my email now… I don’t have an android phone, and I use DuckDuckGo… My browser is Firefox. I haven’t really gone out of my way to remove Google intentionally, it’s just sort of happened gradually and has been a death by a thousand cuts. I used to have a Pixel, but I got fed up with the lack of long term support on Android devices and they’d always die on me… I used to have Google Fi for my phone plan, but it was just more expensive and the support wasn’t great… honestly any Google product has terrible customer support because they kind of build things hoping you’ll never have to talk to a human.I’m a bit confused, Google sucks but this article is about MS and OpenAI. Did you comment on the wrong post?
YEP I DID. This was meant to be on the post about degoogling… I feel like I keep having a problem with Lemmy where I end up on the wrong post when I click? It’s super weird… Am I the only one that ends up on the weird sports post all the time when I didn’t go there?
Yeah, having the post swap to a different one while you’re commenting is a known Lemmy bug.
Okay. I will feel less shame… I could have sworn I was on the right thread… I clicked on it, check the post, checked the image… but I guess it took me a while to write the comment and they pulled the old switcharoo on me. I thought I was going insane.
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Hmmm. I don’t think it was the former. I clicked on the degoogle post and read degoogle related things… no clue how I ended up here, especially if the second bug means I’d see this post but still be commenting on the old one. Oh well, I guess! Maybe I’m losing my marbles, but using the progressive web app on iOS seems pretty buggy too.
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