@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

@buckfiftyseven what a weird argument - no, looking at things you want to and not things you don’t is def. not equivalent to taking everything someone has worked to do, repackaging it and selling it through a for-profit company without consent. That’s even apart from it’s not simple static ads most have an issue with but profiled non-context data broker content served up for manipulative purposes (e.g. targeted political disinformation). 1/2
more simply, copyright has a clue in the name - if you’re not copying, you’re not doing anything against it.
Viewing bits of something is not copying, so using a tool to block some content is nothing to do with copyright.
Not only this, to run my simple blog, I actually have to pay real costs in bandwidth/time/other people’s effort to set up up blocks etc. to stop stealing AI scrapers making it all fall over trying to take my work *wholesale* for their profit. 2/2