Comment on AI and Data Scraping on the Archive

  1. impertinence Tue 16 May 2023 01:38PM UTC

    A brave attempt to deflect from the fact that your legal chair made shit up to the US Copyright Office, engaging in credulous "AI" boosterism based on vibes and ? people she talked to ?

    You should have a survey mechanism to gather feedback from stakeholders prior to claiming you've gathered feedback before, again, the United States Copyright Office.

    This includes their position that users should be allowed to opt out from having their works incorporated into AI training sets, a position that they have presented to the U.S. Copyright Office. is a gross misrepresentation of Rosenblatt's comments.

    "Maximum inclusivity of fanworks" that includes machine-created nonsense is a ridiculous interpretation of your mandate. Why allow LLM fic and not fic prompts? Why allow a genre of fiction which by definition is created by a for-profit tool with minimal human involvement? Who does this decision serve? Based on Rosenblatt's comments about DALL-E/ChatGPT fic, the answer is, again, "credulous staffers with bad taste", but why precisely does that take precedent over the needs and interests of your now-massive user base?

    Shameful day.

    Last Edited Tue 16 May 2023 01:40PM UTC

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    1. Sherloqued Tue 16 May 2023 02:27PM UTC

      Yes, absolutely. It's a disappointment.

      And no doubt, before we think just how magnanimous all of this can be, these companies have insured that they have patent/copyright protection!!!!

      Last Edited Tue 16 May 2023 02:35PM UTC

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      1. impertinence Tue 16 May 2023 02:49PM UTC

        Crucially, the companies themselves have patents and expect to profit from the technology but the state of copyright protections for system outputs and indeed the training dataset itself are entirely up in the air. All the more reason to respect your users and not functionally lie to regulatory bodies about what feedback you've gathered. And all the more reason to be cautious about what content is permitted on the site using novel technology, rather than declaring machine-extruded prose "fanworks" worth preserving.

        Last Edited Tue 16 May 2023 02:52PM UTC

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        1. Sherloqued Tue 16 May 2023 03:09PM UTC

          Yes, absolutely.

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    3. gildedfrost Tue 16 May 2023 09:45PM UTC

      What comments has Rosenblatt made to the US Copyright Office?

      The comments that I have seen were from an interview with ARL.org, however if Rosenblatt has made similar comments to the Copyright Office, then that would be much more concerning.

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      1. Kereudio Tue 16 May 2023 11:22PM UTC

        I don't think the comments are in text format, but this thread breaks some of them down, as well as provides timestamps.

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        1. impertinence Tue 16 May 2023 11:45PM UTC

          Yep, this is what I was thinking of.

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    5. ofthesummer Wed 17 May 2023 01:16AM UTC

      Real fans need to team up and get her removed from her position ASAP.

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    6. lurrel Wed 17 May 2023 02:50PM UTC

      Whew I really do not like the idea of OTW going to bat for AI to the danged US Copyright Office -- how much work has gone in to coming up with that as an official stance? I do not think the paying members could be considered at a consensus about this at all.

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      1. impertinence Wed 17 May 2023 03:44PM UTC

        With the full disclosure that i'm not a paying member because I frankly do not trust the OTW to look out for fan interests, yeah, as far as I know there was no effort to collect feedback nor communication with membership (or site users -- who are also stakeholders, since the OTW is a nonprofit serving fandom) and there really should have been. It's disrespectful at best to present yourself as representative of fan interests and make statements about fan perceptions of AI without actually consulting with those fans beyond your immediate social circle or doing any outreach or education of your community. If you don't want to talk to strangers, you shouldn't represent an org that serves millions in front of the government, it's that simple.

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    8. Unicron Sun 21 May 2023 01:50AM UTC

      For me that is as big an issue as anything, and I thank you bringing it up when many people aren't. The fact the chair spoke in an offical capacity in favor of aI for the organization when she is set to profit off of AI work.

      Even in a nonprofit you NEED to have standards of conduct for your volunteers. It was such an obvious conflict of interests I am disgusted there isn't anything in OTW's bylaws to kick people out for things like this.

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