Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.
The OP tweet seems to be leaning pretty hard on the “AI bad” sentiment. If LLMs make academic knowledge more accessible to people that’s a good thing for the same reason what Aaron Swartz was doing was a good thing.
On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.
The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.
ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.
Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents. If you’re wondering about something and don’t know what you don’t know, or have any idea where to start looking to learn what you want to know, a LLM is an incredible resource even with caveats and limitations.
Of course, it would be better if it could also directly reference and provide the copyrighted/paywalled sources it draws its information from at runtime, in the interest of verifiably accurate information. Fortunately, local models are becoming increasingly powerful and lower barrier of entry to work with, so the legal barriers to such a thing existing might not be able to stop it for long in practice.
i agree, my problem is that it wont
Except it won’t. And AI we’ll be pay to play
Aint jstor a private enterprise?
It’s a US “non-profit”. One that demands 19$ per article which they merely provide as aggregator, they don’t own shit.
Utterly absurd.
To paraphrase Nixon:
“When you’re a company, it’s not illegal.”
To paraphrase Trump:
“When you’re a company, they just let you do it.”
Rip Aaron
RIP AARON
Remember what you learned in school: Working as a team to solve a test or problem is unacceptable!!! Unless you are a company town.
double standards are capitalism’s lifeblood
Find me any charitable, non-profit, or community organization that wouldn’t call the cops if someone was breaking into their networking closet to install data harvesting hardware.
I know of a case in a German university where something like that was dealt with quietly and internally.
But your argumentation structure is flawed. It would be better to argue what an organization ought to do and how that is legally and ethically justified than to argue that every organization would call the cops.
I mean your argumentation boils down to your own ignorance (I don’t know of any case ergo it is impossible/improbable) or hand waving that it is obvious. That is not convincing Argument imho even if what you are arguing for is correct. Which I don’t believe just to be clear.
Anything the rich and powerful do retroactively becomes okay
All is legal in the eyes of capital.
except piracy!
By peons*
Totally fine when they do it.
Yes… but it was MIT that pushed the feds to prosecute.
Never forge to name the proper perp.
Disgusting. And we subsidize their existence 🤡
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
Ortiz said “Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.”
Is OpenAI profitable now?
Is OpenAI open still?
Never really was
Who writes the laws? There’s your answer.
I’m curious why https://www.falconfinance.ae/ cares about this though.
The hell they are selling? https://www.falconfinance.ae/falcon-securities/
I did some digging. It’s a parody finance website that makes it seem like you can invest in falcons and make a blockchain (flockchain) with them. Dig a little further, go to the linked forum, and you’ll see it’s just a community of people shitposting (mostly).
Can we be honest about this, please?
Aaron Swartz went into a secure networking closet and left a computer there to covertly pull data from the server over many days without permission from anyone, which is absolutely not the same thing as scraping public data from the internet.
He was a hero that didn’t deserve what happened, but it’s patently dishonest to ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as hostile behavior. Even your local library would call the cops if you tried to do that.
You left out the part where, instead of telling him to knock it off as soon as they learned about it and disciplining him internally as a student, the school contacted law enforcement and allowed him to continue doing it so they could prosecute him harder make an example out of him. You’d think if he was as big of a threat as you’re implying, they would stop what he was doing ASAP. And if you’re going to be pedantic about leaving out details, maybe tell the whole thing. Maybe it’s not “honest” enough if we haven’t posted the full text of a documentary in a comment. That’s clearly your call.
Can we be honest about this
Saying “can we be honest” isn’t a magic spell that transmutes your opinion to fact.
patently dishonest ignore that he was effectively breaking and entering, plus installing a data harvesting device in the server room, which any organization in the world would rightfully identity as a hostile.
