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  • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
  • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
  • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.
  • @kibiz0r@midwest.socialEnglish
    39•7 days ago

    I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

    AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

    I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

    Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

    They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

    Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

    Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.

    • @squaresinger@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6•6 days ago

      You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:

      Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

      Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

      Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn’t actually say.

      Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?

      Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren’t.

      Because fair use isn’t actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, …) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).

      That’s the whole point of fair use. It’s even in the name. It’s about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It’s not called “Allowed techniques, don’t care if it’s fair”.