@tante @ai6yr I wrote about this yesterday, Mastodon's decision to voluntarily downsize in the face of AI. I think it's sad, but I'll take the clue and start unfollowing.
@buckfiftyseven @tante So let me get this right. You are an AI fan, and you don't like people who are not fans of AI (for the reasons in that post), so you are unfollowing people who don't like AI? That's fine, I guess. 🤔

@ai6yr @tante That's a very shallow way to represent it. I would say I understand American copyright law, and I understand the contradiction of people who run ad blockers while claiming they support copyright law and the contradiction of people who run ad blockers saying that AI training is stealing.

Public domain exists. Open source exists. Creative Commons exists. And the body of law on fair use goes back quite a long time.

@buckfiftyseven @tante Ah, so you are saying if you are using an ad blocker, you are as wrong as the AI companies?
@ai6yr @tante it seems pretty similar doesn't it? Taking what you want from a website, regardless of the host's intentions?
@buckfiftyseven @ai6yr @tante I think most running an adblocker is doing so to block data brokers, not the ad itself. Privacy is as much part of the equation here as the actual ad.

@mrbase @ai6yr @tante we definitely ended up in an unsatisfactory situation with respect to ads, brokers, and blockers. There's no denying that.

It's interesting that no matter what your website license says, the courts say that the blockers are legal, filtering available content under some concept of fair use.

So we are back to what exactly are AIs doing that is stealing? We can give public domain data a clean pass. I think that they honor most open source and Creative Commons licenses 1/2

@mrbase @ai6yr @tante so we are into a muddy legal ground that will probably have to be battled out in the actual courts, about how a fair use doctrine invented in 1741 for copyrighted works applies forward now.

That's just the input side of course. On the output side it seems clear that too closely reproducing an existing work would be a violation as well.

2/2