UnCONventional

So Meta/Facebook apparently used millions of books to train its AI model without the permission of the authors or publishers. These aren't even books they purchased, but books they illegally downloaded. I've known about this for a few weeks (and apparently the story first broke back in January), but The Atlantic has a tool to see if a book has been stolen.

And lo and behold The Witch and the Rose is in there.

It's honestly frustrating how a major company like this can just blatantly violate copyright law. It's not only copyrighted content, but stolen copyrighted content. We spent the last several decades with major companies going after people for piracy, and a company run by a billionaire can just casually get away with it. And from all reports, this is something Zuckerberg himself authorized.

I am, frankly, deeply frustrated.

Look, I have a nuanced opinion on generative AI. I think there are good applications when its created using ethically sourced training data -- but the fact is literally none of the commercial products out there right now are. People keep trying to use it for everything, and companies keep shoehorning it into every product. But, like, you should not be using ChatGPT to get "answers" to questions because generative AI doesn't actually understand what its saying. Large language models are literally fancy autocomplete, and it can "hallucinate" some wild stuff. You cannot trust anything it produces.

I hate that it's called "AI," because it leads folks to think something deeper is happening behind the scenes. But its not. Image generation is more interesting on a technical level, but again -- none of the image generators available right now are trained on ethically sourced data.

Frankly, generative AI in all of its forms is trained on other people's work, so (what we're pretending is) AI can never truly produce a real work of creativity. It's all derivative schlock. And if we lived in a world where it was built honestly and ethically, it could be useful for things like rapid prototyping and brainstorming.

But we don't live in that world.

So don't use it.

And fuck Meta, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg for stealing my book.

On April 26th I'm going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you're in town!