Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

Technology@lemmy.world – 190 points – 1 years ago

Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI

An update to Google's privacy policy suggests that the entire public internet is fair game for it's AI projects.

Isn't crawling and scraping content what Google and every other search engine has been doing since day one?

I'm guessing previously they indexed the data and didn't actually use it. Nowadays they're using it directly themselves. You could argue previously they were making money from Google ads but google was always ad free I believe. Results had sponsors for sure but that wasn't linked to your data

Indexing is using it. They’d use the content of the page to decide how best to index it for search.

Yes. It’s almost silly that they had to say it. I bet lawyers were involved.

Google has always been scraping data

The most realistic part of the Marvel movies was Ultron dipping into the internet for 4 seconds, then deciding humans need to be extinct.

"Don't look up" also has those "and this is why God sent the flood" (aka what is this shit, start over!) vibes.

I don't see why this is a problem (apart from supposedly private data like email), it's not just Google that can do this, all this data is available to everyone for everyone who can use it to benefit. If you want to make Google pay for a publicly available good, tax them accordingly. That's the point of taxes: if you are successful enough to take advantage in any way from a country's public roads, education system, access to a labour market and a functioning society generally, taxing the massive profits from using that system is fair, not enclosing everything and holding access to the content we contributed hostage.

Yeah public data is public. If anyone doesn't want their shitty comments or whatever to be used for AI training then put it behind a login or something.

Except that’s not true, public posting of content does not trump copyright protection. Google using content for AI purposes is almost certainly a copyright issue. I may post content for human consumption but that does not mean I allow it to be used by a private corporation for profit purposes

Can we please not empower copyright to such silly extent? Copyright is already utter garbage and some want to extend to tweets, comments and whatnot.

Also, AI is copying the same way we copy everything - by learning. So we shouldn't be allowed to quote and refer to stuff we learn about online? In no way this argument makes sense - down with the copyright.

That’s not empowering copyright. That’s literally how it works. Copyright is automatic, and if you do not have a prior agreement assigning copyright it is awarded to the person who created said content, be it a tweet, blog post, etc.

If I make a blog post and google scrapes the data and uses that day for profit, that’s copyright infringement, unless they can prove fair use, which has narrow definitions that training an AI for profit purposes definitely doesn’t fall under

I dread reality you're describing where every bit of information is propriatory. I think the world is a better place with free information. What you're describing sounds whole lot like throwing the baby out with the bath water - just because big tech corporations are "bad".

I mean you can dread it all you want, because that is LITERALLY how it works today. Google, OpenAI and Microsoft already have multiple lawsuits for stealing people’s copyrights to train their LLMs.

Copyright is assigned automatically. If I make a blog post, that is automatically my copyrighted material. As the creator I get to choose how it’s used, not Google

If I took some proprietary Google code and used it without permission you know damn well they would sue my ass into oblivion. Copyright has to protect the small as well as the giant.

I don't think you understand.

Let's imagine everything is copyrighted. Who will be able to create LLMs now? Google/Meta who can afford to literally hire thousands of people on below minimum wage creating annotations or smaller companies and free projects? You are literally empowering the thing you're complaining about.

Public data is public and that's good for general balance. It removed the moats.

I don’t think you understand? You’re talking about some “information must be free Star Trek future” that doesn’t exist. I’m talking about the exact legal framework that exists today.

If I write a short story somewhere, why the fuck should someone be able to profit off of it because they pointed a bot at my site? How do you prevent giant corps from eventually squashing and owning everything?

Just because something is publicly accessible doesn’t mean it’s public. I would maybe start here

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#protect

If Google or Meta wants to make an LLM off my content, they can fucking have the decency to ask or pound sand. Adding a clause to some policy somewhere doesn’t auto-magically remove my legal rights

If I write a short story somewhere,

it's a two way street - if you want to benefit from the free flow of information (your story being public) you should also bear the costs. I feel we've reached the end of this thread so lets just agree to disagree. Maybe my distaste for copyrighting information is too great here for you to convince me otherwise :)

If you want to make Google pay for a publicly available good, tax them accordingly.

Tax them where? In the US? But a lot of the content they scrape would be European. So does EU get to tax them for content scraped from EU users and US for content scraped from US users? Actually, how DO we define the locality of online content? By host server? Site owning company/person's legal location? Content poster's location?

Much as I'd love to see Google pay more taxes, I'm not sure how this would play out.

I was with the post until the taxes. Came out of nowhere

It did not come out of nowhere, it's right in there: I mentioned taxes because using a public good/service is only freeloading (like people imply with google scraping public data or Elon when he talks about data pillaging) if you don't pay for its upkeep.

As long as they don’t present that data as their own, I am fine with it. But wait, that’s exactly what they’re doing.. I have a vision of a thousand lawsuits shoved down the throat of the mighty Alphabet.

Why is AI scraping not respecting robots.txt? It wasn’t ok early internet days, so why is it ok now? People are complaining about being overloaded by scrapers like it’s the 90’s

Technically they're violating CFAA if they don't respect Robots.txt.

What's robots.txt

Here's an example https://www.google.com/robots.txt

Basically it's a file people put in their root directory of their domain to tell automated web crawlers what sections of the website and what kind of web crawlers are allowed to access their resources.

It isn't a legally binding thing, more of a courtesy. Some sites may block traffic if they're detecting the prohibited actions, so it gives your crawlers an idea of what's okay in order to not get blocked.

Got it. Thanks.

It’s a plain text file that is hosted on your site that should be visible to the internet. Basically allows/disallows scraping from search engines in your site.

I see a problem with it - just like there is a problem with all their data collection. They are taking our data without consideration nor compensation, and using it for their profitable commercial enterprise. They should be paying us for that data.

You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. Yet that is exactly what they've been doing, and they've become filthy rich doing it, at the expense of every one of us.

Don't see a problem with it as long as they don't get copyright on the outputs of their AI. That would make enforcing any IP impossible on the internet because there's no way to prove it wasn't AI generated.

So that’s a win-win?

Google uses free content we’ve all put out there open for everyone and we lose an archaic idea of private ownership.

I believe them...

This is why I've never trusted google.

They're very nice people, but everybody is decent until they need to hit quarterly earnings.

They were already doing this

Not saying it's a comforting thought but that's one of several reasons why one doesn't post anything online if they aren't comfortable with outcomes such as this.

Get in line