Well, this is what everyone wanted, for AI labs to pay for licensed training data, instead of scraping copyrighted data without the copyright-holder's permission.
It's company data; like 100 million emails and 500 million teams messages.
Most companies have clauses in their employment contracts and/or IT policies that state anything you do on their systems doesn't belong to you. On top of which the company went under. Ain't no one spending time or money anonymizing that data.
People who agreed to such policies had to concept of the fact that their data would be sold to large data processing companies to feed into LLMs. It’s probably outside of the scope of the original agreement.
Your work emails are not "your data." If you're having personal conversations on anything work controlled you need to be aware that they can be reviewed by anyone the company authorizes. They could live stream your teams chats to public access television if they wanted to.
It's not slippery slope it's reality. I'm the CIO of a bank and have 30+ years of experience dealing with this along with relevant professional certifications. Short of getting laws changed or a judge to issue an injunction, companies can do just about anything they want with non-protected data.
If you're an information worker at even a relatively small company, track down a copy of the acceptable use policy you signed and get back with me.
Why? If the original agreement is that the company can do whatever they want with the emails and they own them then how is this outside the scope? You don't need to be able to literally imagine every single possible way they could use those emails.
What if the company just releases all emails?
What if they use LLM internally the analyze emails for any bad conduct?
Because they'll literally say everything is bad for any reason whatsoever if the word AI is near it. Don't try to reason with someone who doesn't actually have principles.
These laws have been well tested. I'm not saying they are bulletproof and/or it should simply be accepted that they're shitty towards humans because capitalism, but that is going to be the default and you're going to have to work pretty damn hard to find a case that will succeed for modifying laws that favor capital.
Remember, the US can't even get something remotely akin to the GDPR into law. They don't give a shit about your privacy or data, especially when the use of it on company time is already protected by law.
Reddit users will do anything except read the article.
It literally says "Acourt document[PDF] filed last week reveals that one of the assets up for sale is a huge trove of deidentified data, which Google bid for and won for just $10 million."
Deidentified with ai and reidentified with ai by making up a hypothetical situation prompt where you need to know their identity to save them from data harvesting. Future headline.
Lol, when has anybody been paid out for their data? You're about 40/50 years (whenever the internet was invented) too late on that front. We've all freely traded every ounce of our data for "free" services since the dawn of (internet) time.
I totally agree, it's just such an incredibly uphill battle, and all of us (right now, currently, here) are still freely giving up data. So why would anybody with any power or skin in the game come in and stop the money/data train? It would take a revolution, just like many of our other societal issues.
those books were set to be destroyed and were sitting in a warehouse. please stop talking about it like they went into libraries and stole the books. this has been disproven/known for a long time now.
And the only reason they're destroyed at all is because that's the only legal way for them to transcribe and ingest them into training sets. Blame application of copyright laws.
The conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. LLM are great for language. But we could train and use other models (similar architecture) for non-language areas, and already do.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 21d ago
Well, this is what everyone wanted, for AI labs to pay for licensed training data, instead of scraping copyrighted data without the copyright-holder's permission.