Federico Viticci 
We were not crazy. We were right.
Amazing work by our @robb corroborated by extensive analysis at Wired:
Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-is-a-bullshit-machine/
Regulation in this space cannot come soon enough.
AI companies that want to scrape the web for training purposes, or use their bots to summarize webpages, should follow a strict set of guidelines with identifiable user-agents and IP addresses.
Publishers should have a right to opt out of any AI access, request details as to whether their copyrighted content is included in any model, and if so, request that its gets removed and the model re-trained.
Hopefully the EU's AI Act will help.
Most of all, we need to let go of this notion that open web = okay for commercial companies to scrape, ingest, and train their models.
If I wanted to open an English school, I would have opened a school to teach the English language. But I didn't.
I have a website, which is free to read, but my copyrighted material is mine and shouldn't serve as the foundation of any other commercial product.
I wish more people would understand this concept.
The Animal and the Machine@viticci @Gargron
I want to throw a book at them and ask them if they own the book.
• They own that mass.
• They can read that mass.
• They can copy that mass for personal use.
• They cannot copy that mass for selling.
• They own a thing. They also own a copy of an idea of a thing. They don’t own the idea of that thing.
• You may visit my website.
• You may read my website.
• As it is public you may even scape my website.
• You can also build an AI off of my website. You really can… but for personal use.
BUT
• Your AI contains part of my website so if you want to sell it you’ve got to ask me and all the owners first.
• WTF is the argument that that isn’t practical. No it isn’t. It just means what you did was stupid.
AI in Silicon valley has gotten where it is on rich white male privilege expressed in the legal framework.
Now, if you find the A in #AI offensive and you declare it Electrical Intelligence (#EI) as life with human rights and learning, then we can have an ethics conversation.
But as long as you say you own it, it isn’t learning, it’s processing and you can fuck off.