I'm okay with games temporarily being encumbered with extreme DRM like Denuvo if it is removed within the year. It just means I get to buy a DRM-free game at a discount.

It's a compromise I can live with, too. Let's be honest for a second:

1. Denuvo DOES work. It's the first DRM in history that's actually by far and large undefeated.
2. The first few months after launch are the most crucial for a game's financial success.
3. People pirate anything and everything, if they can. It's kinda naive to claim that piracy doesn't hurt the developers.

I hate DRM as much as the next person, but looking at points 1 through 3, I can somewhat understand why publishers use DRM. I don't want developers to go out of business, so using DRM combined with the commitment to remove it 6-12 months after launch would be acceptable in my book.

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Yeah, I dumped Ubuntu for Mint because of Snap, too. I couldn't be bothered to jump through increasingly many hoops to keep this stuff off my system. I would assume that's at least one contributor for Ubuntu overall losing market share.

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That baffles me, too. One should think the CCP would push a OS not controlled by the U.S. and do anything to make its IT as independent as possible. An OS that, on top of all that, doesn't even cost anything.

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Legality aside, in my opinion this is only ethical if openly accessible means public domain or otherwise permissively licenced work.

There was at least one proof-of-concept image generation model that used only CC-0/Public Domain images for training. It was pretty good at classic art, from what I could see (which makes sense). But alas, while there is plenty of OSS code around to train coding-oriented models with, text and art is a different affair. People aren't nearly as liberal with placing that under free licenses.

For most of these models, "openly accessible" meant that they downloaded whatever was NOT behind a paywall or login barriers, and trained their models with that. Downloading unprotected assets from the internet is not considered a copyright violation, so legally that's fine until this point. Whether redistributing models trained on such data is, is currently what the lawyers argue about. The sticking point is that there is no trace of the original data in the weights, so arguing copyright violation is harder than some people seem to think.

The ethic side is a different affair, of course. The problem is that different people have different ethical standards, so that's why we urgently need legal clarification and/or new regulations. Requiring individual consent is prohibitively impractical (unless we want to strangulate AI model creation by requiring them to get hundreds of millions of signatures from content creators first). That's why I hope for some sort of taxation of commercial models (while keeping open source models exempt). But that's just me. Opinions of what should be done are all over the place.

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*moderator snip*

For the record, I earn money with developing software and written works, and have done so for a long time. And yes, I actually own full rights for my works, because I am not employed (thankfully). I would be actually insulted if my stuff wouldn't be in these training sets. Do I feel corporations creating for-profit LLMs (including ClosedAI) should pay some sort of compensation for using my stuff? Absolutely. I hope they will place a tax on for-profit (only these) AI models one day and distribute the proceedings among creators.

It's still not stealing when use it without asking me. How can we make the other side take us for serious when we can't even use the correct words to argue our case?

PS: What META did was a clear case of copyright infringement, and I hope they get massively fined for it. That's an extreme case, though. Most of the AI models I am aware of used scrapers to collect openly accessible texts/images etc. If that's even illegal under current law is a different question.

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I have non-flattering opinions about some things people do, too. I still don't get to label their actions criminal if they're not. Me not liking what they do isn't a crime unless the law says it is.

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I wish people would stop using the word "stolen" when nothing ever was taken away from anybody. This is solely about whether or not using people's works to train LLMs is still fair use or not. That question is currently before the courts. Right now we're not even sure what the outcome will be, so maybe we can demilitarize the used vocabulary at least until then?

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Nice to see that the Steam Deck seems to be a trustworthy device to these devs. It's so great that nobody can open a terminal on the Deck to install cheatware on the Deck!

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That's how give and take works! :)

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We, Linux users, know this very well, don't we?

Except that in contrast to Valve, pretty much everyone hates M$, and people STILL don't switch. That's how hard it is to convince people to move away from an established product when there is no compelling reason to.

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