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“A High School Teacher’s Free Image Database Powers AI Unicorns”:
To build LAION, founders scraped visual data from companies such as Pinterest, Shopify and Amazon Web Services — which did not comment on whether LAION’s use of their content violates their terms of service — as well as YouTube thumbnails, images from portfolio platforms like DeviantArt and EyeEm, photos from government websites including the US Department of Defense, and content from news sites such as The Daily Mail and The Sun. If you ask Schuhmann, he says that anything freely available online is fair game. But there is currently no AI regulation in the European Union, and the forthcoming AI Act, whose language will be finalized early this summer, will not rule on whether copyrighted materials can be included in big data sets. Rather, lawmakers are discussing whether to include a provision requiring the companies behind AI generators to disclose what materials went into the data sets their products were trained on, thus giving the creators of those materials the option of taking action. […] “It has become a tradition within the field to just assume you don’t need consent or you don’t need to inform people, or they don’t even have to be aware of it. There is a sense of entitlement that whatever is on the web, you can just crawl it and put it in a data set,” said Abeba Birhane, a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation.
(tags: consent opt-in web ai ml laion training-data scraping)
Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Fantastic thread of hackers scratching their own itch (via SimonW)
(tags: via:simonw hacking projects hn hacks open-source)
informative Twitter thread on the LessWrong/rationalist/”AI risk”/effective altruism cult
“some people understand immediately when i try to explain what it was like to be fully in the grip of the yudkowskian AI risk stuff and some people it doesn’t seem to land at all, which is probably good for them and i wish i had been so lucky”. Bananas…
(tags: cults ai-risk yudkowski future rokos-basilisk lesswrong effective-altruism)