It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.
But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots.
“Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.
So if Reddit wins, then the data that was used is worth something and Meta is screwed for their piracy. And if Reddit loses, they lose. This feels like a win win, no?
No, we actually want reddit to lose because FOSS models of worth will be completely impossible if we allow AI to be treated this way by copyright, instead of the obvious sane conclusion which should be that its up to the people who’ve used the tools to pass copyright tests by traditional means, as in, was the work transformatively different to an extent that it is different work?
I think perhaps there could be something to be said for FOSS ai simply not having damages, but I really think we ought not be so gun happy with regulating AI, because some of the biggest proponents of regulation, are AI companies, and I think that should be really telling to us.
They know they’re the only ones with the funding to acquire enough material “legitimately”, so they are building moats via regulatory capture, and many people, being too happy to jump in resistance to AI are helping them get the worst possible outcome for our freedom.