Opinionated article by Alexander Hanff, a computer scientist and privacy technologist who helped develop Europe’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and ePrivacy rules.
We cannot allow Big Tech to continue to ignore our fundamental human rights. Had such an approach been taken 25 years ago in relation to privacy and data protection, arguably we would not have the situation we have to today, where some platforms routinely ignore their legal obligations at the detriment of society.
Legislators did not understand the impact of weak laws or weak enforcement 25 years ago, but we have enough hindsight now to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes moving forward. The time to regulate unlawful AI training is now, and we must learn from mistakes past to ensure that we provide effective deterrents and consequences to such ubiquitous law breaking in the future.
I agree that the models themselves are clearly transformative. That doesn’t mean it’s legal for Meta to pirate everything on earth to use for training. THAT’S where the infringement is. And they admitted they used pirated material: https://www.techspot.com/news/101507-meta-admits-using-pirated-books-train-ai-but.html
I would enjoying seeing megacorps held to at least the same standards as individuals. I would prefer for those standards to be reasonable across the board, but that’s not really on the table here.