• aleph@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Big tech companies making vast profits off of users providing data for free instead of paying workers wages in exchange for manufacturing goods is only going to deepen the disparity of wealth in society.

      What we desperately need is essentially a Digital Bill of Rights so that we can legally own our own data.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        you’d have to rally everyone against the most profitable businesses right now for this to happen.

        • aleph@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Private ownership ≠ capitalism. Monopoly is a critique of free market capitalism, which naturally leads to a concentration of wealth for those who hold all the assets. Giving people ownership of their own data would help redistribute that wealth in a more equitable way.

          No, it won’t fix the underlying problem of Capitalism, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

          • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Private ownership ≠ capitalism.

            Right. It’s private ownership of capital; aka the means of production. You’re saying that data should be owned because it can be used productively. That’s exactly capitalism for capitalism’s sake.

            This is a typical economically right-wing approach. There is a problem, so you just create a new kind of property and call it done. The magic of the market takes care of it, or something. I don’t understand why one would expect a different result from trying the same thing.

            • aleph@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              The point of it is to redistribute wealth using the existing capitalist framework, which is a left-wing endeavour.

              • General_Effort@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                But it doesn’t redistribute wealth. To do that, you have to take wealth from somewhere and spread it elsewhere.

                • aleph@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  Right, so instead of big tech companies keeping all the profits made from utilizing user data, a big chunk of it goes back into the pockets of the users themselves. Like a cooperative organization that shares profits with its workers.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          5 months ago

          you mean theres no infinite growth and eventually it would lead to overextracting wealth from the people? just preposterous.

          • jaybone@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            It’s almost as if you could look at countries containing 1/6 of the world’s population and see where all of this is going.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You already own everything by default unless you forfeit your rights by implicitly accepting terms and conditions of a specific service.

        • aleph@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          So basically don’t interact with 99% of online platforms, then?

          • Aux@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Yes. That’s the whole point of them: you give away your information and most of your rights. Even if it’s something like Lemmy, open source, free, no ads, etc, you’re still forfeiting your rights. Because otherwise you cannot share anything publicly. Only private and inaccessible platforms can protect your rights. For example, a private Telegram channel protected by a password and with forced E2E encryption might protect your rights (I’m not sure about Telegram ToS, so I’m not 100% sure), but public platforms - never. They’re public, that’s the point.

            • aleph@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              That’s fine for the tech-literate minority of us, but totally unrealistic for the average citizen.

    • Grimy@lemmy.world
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      The amount is incredibly vaste. If we go by quantity no one here is getting a dime, and if we go by quality…it’s probably the same. Not to mention the logistics of getting everyone their penny or two.

      And the data right now belongs to everyone. For example, Reddit technically ‘owns’ it’s content, but anyone can use it for ml purposes.

      It’s why a lot of these campaigns about data ownership are being pushed. If the gov passes laws, it won’t be to the benefit of the individual but the data aggregators like Reddit, Shutterstock, etc.

      They are playing on emotions and manipulating people into thinking killing AI FOSS and erecting data barriers is in their interest.

    • zoey@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      Don’t mind my tipsy Friday rambling, but this is actually an interesting thing to think about. Kinda wonder how that would work, if it were to be real. Maybe there’d be a single centralized data broker, or we could choose from a list of vendors, like how sharing cookies works.
      Would it be per a specific amount of data, identifiable data, what if we just dumped 10 years of chats into it.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Maybe there’d be a single centralized data broker

        Hmm like a government office? With the power to adhere marks to ip that prevent copying and granting rights to people? Like a department of copy-right or something

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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        5 months ago

        But then think of how much money the big platforms wouldn’t have to bully around users.

    • Turun@feddit.de
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      5 months ago

      I am watching a lot of YouTube. Premium would cost 13€/month, or 130€ if paid yearly. I use an ad blocker and don’t want any of the extra features that are provided to premium users. So until they manage to make unblockable ads, 130€/year could very reasonably be considered profit for the act of selling my data.

  • cmrn@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    IMO it’s one thing if you posted things publicly on the internet and it’s getting scraped, in the same way a human would find it.

    But it’s disgusting when all these companies retroactively update their TOS, or force you into zero privacy to continue using their service.

      • nexussapphire@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        They were already doing this but now they’re beginning to become afraid of the legal ramifications. Using data like this hasn’t gotten so close to redistribution of Common Law copyrighted work .

        If someone can provide evidence of an AI regurgitating their work verbatim or with no alterations they can be in serious legal trouble. We all have this right, but they have the right to sign a contract with us outlining the terms of the copyright and or granting them a perpetual license to the work. Just remember any work you do for your company isn’t yours but the companies as per the work for hire doctrine.

          • nexussapphire@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Na, just saying in case someone didn’t know. It’s the same with anything. Just don’t use company resources to make a product. That day you end up in court it won’t end well.

    • archomrade [he/him]@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      This is the entire issue for me.

      Privatizing what is otherwise public content, and then privatizing the models that are trained on that content and making me pay for having it regurgitated back at me.

      I think AI would be really cool, IF:

      • it wasn’t being shoved into every goddamn thing
      • it wasn’t being used as justification to cut jobs
      • it was a open source project and wasn’t being gatekept by capitalist interests
    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      How is the latter example different? You think they weren’t scraping your posts this whole time??? Just because they’re telling you now due to ai doesn’t mean they werent scraping B4.

  • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    There is no “data ownership”. It’s all made up. If you don’t want people to copy and build off your ideas, don’t share them. That’s not to defend corpos Btw. I posit that any ai models trained on public data must be open sourced by default.

    • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Autodesk has mandatory cloud saves, and MS got caught training on private github repos. They don’t care whether it’s public or not

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        What did the user agreement say? Also just out of curiosity do you remember all those privacy nuts back in the day who warned us all about the dangers of closed source software?

    • nehal3m@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      Your heart rate. Your step count. Your location. Your searches. Your browser history. Your call history. Your contacts. Your transactions. Your credit history. Your medical history. This is data that you didn’t choose to create or share, but that you exhaust in the day-to-day things you do.

      Surveillance capitalism has grown too unfathomably huge and ingrained to choose not to share this data; that would be akin to checking out of modern life wholesale in a lot of ways. Guarding this data takes not only the realisation that it needs guarding, but changing law and culture such that the parties that have to have all that data to provide you with services cannot take it from you to sell.

    • trafficnab@lemmy.ca
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      AI is here and it’s here to stay whether we want it or not, either it’s free and legal for everyone to develop (ie training on copyrighted data does not violate copyrights), or only the massively rich corporations will be able to afford to pay for (or already happen to have the rights to as the case may be, see stock photo companies or reddit for examples) the sheer amounts of data that are needed to adequately train them

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    5 months ago

    Yeah, I’m genuinely feeling like I don’t want to publish things I create onto the internet, because these companies will gladly break laws to use it. Companies spent decades building up ridiculous copyright laws and when they go to violate those laws themselves, law enforcement fails.

    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Don’t. Please stop. Don’t publish anything you don’t want shared. There was so much cool free stuff that everyone shared until content creators showed up trying to sell us shit like a bunch of car salesmen. Please stop

      • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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        5 months ago

        Oh, I do want it shared. I just don’t want to be taken advantage of by immoral companies. That’s why I would share it under licenses like AGPLv3 or CC BY-NC-SA. In a sense, I’m very much blocking others from taking the free stuff I share and turning it into a commercial product, because I do feel the same as you.

        • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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          A.I. will destroy copyright completely, and I’m here for it. Art and commerce have no business being bedfellows.

          • wanderingmagus@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            But art, depending on your definition of art, has been sold for thousands of years. Even in Archaic Greece, potters were selling amphorae with intricately painted glazing on the side.

            • Hackworth@lemmy.world
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              Oh, I think Art and Commerce should remain friends. And they’ll probably hook up every now and then, when Art has too much to drink. But they’ve been way too cozy lately.

    • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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      Just create demented shitposts that will poison any AI, like the ones trained on Reddit posts telling users to put glue on their pizza and make chlorine gas.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    5 months ago

    I’m [email protected] all the way (even my email).

    Highly recommend it, even if you start small with like just your calendar or something.

    Even if you can’t self-host, maybe one of your friends can/does and would set you up on their stuff. I’ve got a handful of friends and family hooked into my stack (email, Nextcloud, Matrix, Lemmy, AdGuard DNS, etc).

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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        Not really, though there’s probably something like that out there. It’s more a collection of skills that build on each other, finding a problem to solve, and then solving it (with occasional detours along the way to fill in any knowledge gaps).

        Basically, just stack these on top of each other:

        1. Learn basic Linux skills (I can’t in good conscious recommend hosting or even using Windows)
        2. Familiarize yourself with web standards. Don’t have to be an expert, just understand the basic concepts (web traffic is HTTP based, HTTP usually runs on port 80, HTTPS is secure/encrypted HTTP, don’t send passwords over HTTP, etc).
        3. Find a self-hosted project you’d like to play with. Usually you can just google “self hosted {thing}” such as “Self hosted trello”
        4. The previous step will typically land you on a Github or other project page. Review the docs for getting started on those.
        5. You’ll likely encounter terms or things you don’t understand. Detour to familiarize yourself with them.
        6. Follow the steps to get your first service up and running.
        7. Enjoy!
        8. Once you’re past that, you can fine tune, re-deploy in a better way, or otherwise optimize.

        The next thing you decide to deploy will usually be easier and will further extend and cement the skills you’ve just used.

        It’s definitely a process and collection of skills rather than just one monolithic thing, but each one builds off the other. There’s a learning curve, sure, but just reading the docs for different things will usually get you going or provide a “jumping off” point. e.g. Many services utilize Docker, so you’ll see that in a lot in the docs and probably end up detouring to learn the basics of working with it.

        Some self-hostable applications do have easy deploy scripts which can definitely be good for beginners, but I tend to not like those as if/when something goes wrong, you’re ill-equipped to do any meaningful troubleshooting.

        Members of various selfhosted communities are usually happy to help as long as you’re willing to learn; we typically don’t like to just do it for you lol.

    • Aux@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You’ve just shared some data for free for anyone to use. Self-hosting doesn’t mean shit, my friend.

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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        Yeah? That was the intention, lol. I self-host not because I’m a tinfoil hatter but because I want to be in charge of my own data.

        I’m under no illusion that my public submissions can’t/won’t be scraped. My goal is simply to not give surveillance capitalists a mainline to my personal data nor allow myself to be turned into or used as a product to be mined and sold; I choose what I want to share. I put it out into the world, and whatever comes of it does (or doesn’t).

        The difference is that only what I choose to share can be mined and not everything.

  • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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    We’re speeding towards a point where only the obscenely rich resource hoarders and their corporations actually own anything.

    The rest of us will just use anything, including what is still technically our own bodies, at their pleasure.

    Can’t say I’m quite gleeful about it tbh…

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    I don’t understand what the issue here is? Are people upset that companies that own the AI will churn profit from the free data available on the Internet for them to be trained on?

    If so, this is a hypocritical double standard. We use the Internet for the free information ourselves. We train ourselves but if a company does it for AI all of the sudden all that free information suddenly needs to be paid for because it’s an incorporated institution?

    Y’all need to figure out how free you want this content to be because there’s no in-between.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      … but if a company does it for AI …

      That’s the line. Free for people. Not free for companies.

      • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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        Right but that’s the thing. You can’t have it both ways. Either the information is free or it isn’t.

        If it is offered for free who queries that information should be irrelevant.

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          5 months ago

          I believe it to be relevant, and so do many of the authors of the “information.”

          • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            If the authors of the information wanted to get paid they wouldn’t submit their intellectual property to a website that provides said information for free.

            Like I said either everyone pays or no one does. You can’t have it both ways.

            • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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              5 months ago

              … either everyone pays or no one does.

              How about this. Either everyone pays, or no one does, or only some of them have to pay - depending on their use.

              This all-or-nothing is a false dichotomy. Like look at how much software is free for small scale users or educational or non-profit orgs.

              • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                And how exactly would this work?

                Actually I’ll tell you how this is going to work. Sites like Wikipedia, GitHub, stack overflow, ext will have to force every one of their users to open a personal account and conduct constant verifications to make sure they’re not AI’s.

                From what I’ve seen on the internet people don’t like this.

                So again it can’t be both, either it’s all free or it’s all paid for. There is no in between.

                Look, I know what you want to happen here and I even agree with it on the surface. Cooperations need to pay their fair share and many of them don’t. But I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re asking for.

                Let the AI’s learn for free because in a few years it won’t matter anyway.

                We’re on the precipice of a technological singularity and hopefully in our lifetimes the function of a monetary economy will no longer be relevant.

                • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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                  5 months ago

                  Licenses are binding because courts recognise them. For individual players it’s usually not worth pursuing, unless you’re Nintendo.

                  But for large, wealthy, or venture backed, enterprises (notably, ones with legal departments) a class action suit is much more feasible.

                  This is super basic. We can do better. This isn’t even like novel legal territory. We went through this with photography and Photoshopping.

    • ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      exactly. if a human painter looks at a bunch of posted images to practice with, it’s okay. If a computer does it, it’s evil.

      Both the human artist and the computer eventually create something someone wants to pay for, and neither paid for looking at other people’s art.

      it’s a double standard.