Like everyone's opinion about BGC forums used to train AI models

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RichF

RichF

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First of all i am not proposing, as far as I know Steve has not licensed this site nor has he been approached by any AI compnay. I thought about question after hearing that Reddit had an IPO and the value of the social media site was based upon the value that AI learnings that could be gleaned from the site.

Now what about this site? Great place to learn photography - granted that is narrow area for AI to learn but BCG forums could be an excellent want for AI to learn about photography and possible learn to evaluate images.

Like to your thoughts on this. Again I have no knowledge whether or not Steve has even considered licensing the site for AI learning, I have NOT dug into the licensing terms, I do not know if any AI company has approached Steve. So consider this a fun discussion, how would you feel if you learned, either by Steve announcing it or from another source, that BCG forums was being used to training AI models in photography, in particular wildlife photography.

Please do not get mad at Steve, he has not done anything as far as I know, and I would like to have other's share their thoughts as I have mixed feelings about this.

My thoughts will be on the next msg
 
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Okay, my thoughts.

Ignoring the agreement we all signed when we joined the forum (or at least I think I agreed to something), here are some things I consider

- it is Steve's site
- the site without all our contributions is worthless
- there is a lot of trust we place in the site and most of all, are glad to share our knowledge freely (why else would we post it on a public forum).

Thus if Steve's wants to let an AI company use this site to train an AI model, great. He will reap a finance reward. I would like to see Steve share that with the membership, in particular the active members. This could work by give active members, moderators, some small share of the profits. Or perhaps require the AI company to provide free access to its photographic (or perhaps all) AI tools either inpepituity or for X years.
 
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Honestly, even knowing that many images are scraped off the web to train various AI/ML models I personally wouldn't want the images I've posted here to be used in that way. I share images here for discussion, educational purposes and for simple sharing among other photographers. If some company wants to use my images to develop products I'd consider licensing them but wouldn't simply give them away for product development purposes.
 
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Seems to me that this forum is open to the public for viewing (no signed agreement, etc.) so it is already open to any AI bot that's scanning "the internet" for information. When I post something here, I don't have any expectation of privacy (nor should anyone else). Your DMs are a different story.
 
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KurtH said:
Seems to me that this forum is open to the public for viewing (no signed agreement, etc.) so it is already open to any AI bot that's scanning "the internet" for information. When I post something here, I don't have any expectation of privacy (nor should anyone else). Your DMs are a different story.
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Posted same time Steve posted. Expectation of privacy and posted image grabbing by an unknown are still in the air (i.e., no stopping them even if Steve stopped AI somehow). Although I'm unsure how trying to stop them is achieved.
 
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KurtH said:
Posted same time Steve posted. Expectation of privacy and posted image grabbing by an unknown are still in the air (i.e., no stopping them even if Steve stopped AI somehow). Although I'm unsure how trying to stop them is achieved.
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It all depends if they're operating honestly. They are supposed to look for and comply with text file I installed. However, if an unscrupulous company decided to ignore it, there's really not much we can do, short of making site access members only (which would pretty much destroy any growth, since most people lurk before they join.)
 
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Steve said:
It all depends if they're operating honestly. They are supposed to look for and comply with text file I installed. However, if an unscrupulous company decided to ignore it, there's really not much we can do, short of making site access members only (which would pretty much destroy any growth, since most people lurk before they join.)
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Self-enforcement by the entities that are stealing content, hmmm <said jokingly sarcastic>. Unless there are mechanisms in place to actually stop (not just a warning or statement saying "do not take"), the taking of intellectual property (i.e., everyone's knowledge and photographs posted here) should be assumed to be open game by internet crawlers. And I dont see many of the AI bots stopping at a .txt file...they are out to grab as much information as possible.

AI can do some crazy stuff so the discussion question should be...is Steve actually real?
 
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Charles Loy said:
Sad this came up, it may run away a few or more users, but maybe not
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I doubt it, TBH. The truth is, we all post all over and much of it is fair game to search engines and bots. It's part of the price of entry. All we can do is take steps that everyone has agreed upon for the data posted here and hope AI Bots abide by it. (To be fair, legitimate services will abide by out digital stop signs)
 
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Everything you need to know about how straight AI companies are is captured in the facial expression of OpenAI CTO on her WSJ interview when asked whether Sora is trained on YouTube.

If an image (text, movie, anything) is on the internet, it is ingested and used to train 15-20 different models. Period. No way to stop it and it is perfectly legal.

Screenshot_20240326_193133_Google.jpg
You can only see EXIF info for this image if you are logged in.
 
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Brave new world. Talking with some of my Hollyweird types they think the only survivors will be the creators/writers. While I will never give up the joy that I gain when traveling, witnessing, and capturing an image, that is quickly becoming unnecessary to creating an image.
 
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Steve said:
(To be fair, legitimate services will abide by out digital stop signs)
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Correct, but legit services are not the one's we're worried about. Unfortunately, scammers, foreign governments, etc. don't put rules on their gathering activities nor are they held accountable to any laws. And AI just brings it to a whole different level. But as you mentioned, it's just the price we pay (being fair game) for being on the internet. We should never assume things we post here or elsewhere are somehow private or protected.

So back to the OP, I guess my comments/input wouldn't pertain to profit sharing among contributors as much as it would be towards ownership of BCG forum intellectual property (our posts, pictures, ideas, etc.) and what BCG can do with it. It's obvious that Steve is trying to grow an on-line community revolving around photography, which in turn helps forum participants as well as his business. But under the hypothetical posted by the OP, what IF Steve wanted to monetize the many years of information captured on the forums and other sources? Book? Sell to AI or other seekers?

What if it's already happening without his or our knowledge? And at that point, shouldn't he find a way to use "his" data before (or along with) those that are already secretly using it?
 
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The content here would be too small to be used as content in a LLM anyway. But in a larger context it would certainly add some more potential “answers” from an AI. The robots.txt file is handy for preventing AI bots and crawlers that honor such restrictions. Obviously not every AI or bot will care at all so I wouldn’t be surprised if everything on here has been scraped at least once in the last few years.
 
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RichF said:
First of all i am not proposing, as far as I know Steve has not licensed this site nor has he been approached by any AI compnay. I thought about question after hearing that Reddit had an IPO and the value of the social media site was based upon the value that AI learnings that could be gleaned from the site.

Now what about this site? Great place to learn photography - granted that is narrow area for AI to learn but BCG forums could be an excellent want for AI to learn about photography and possible learn to evaluate images.

Like to your thoughts on this. Again I have no knowledge whether or not Steve has even considered licensing the site for AI learning, I have NOT dug into the licensing terms, I do not know if any AI company has approached Steve. So consider this a fun discussion, how would you feel if you learned, either by Steve announcing it or from another source, that BCG forums was being used to training AI models in photography, in particular wildlife photography.

Please do not get mad at Steve, he has not done anything as far as I know, and I would like to have other's share their thoughts as I have mixed feelings about this.

My thoughts will be on the next msg
Click to expand...

Steve said that he had added the robots.txt code to stop bots from doing this quite some time ago, but how good a solution that is I don't know. The only surefire way of not exposing your images is not to post them online.
 
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AI companies are run by tech kids who never passed an ethics class growing up. They will lie in public about not knowing where they train their AI, and in the next breath reduce hundreds of artists to "*insert name* image styles" in their private Discord servers. I'm waiting to see the same them bringing up those "styles" for Sora soon. The only one they are afraid to scrape at the moment is the music industry who have deep pockets to defend their IP. Everyone else is fair game.

Mass-scraping internet data is not perfectly legal like @Nimi assumed, and any AI-bros who insist so are either ignorant or lying. This whole thing is just so new that lawmakers are still struggling to keep up. The short-term strategy, as Steve has done, is to include a "do not scrape" text command, but it is not enforceable. The long-term strategy is to legally force these companies to fall in line because they will never do so on their own.

With all that said, I'm not strictly anti-AI - I'm against the reckless use, unethical development, and lack of regulatory bodies. After all, assistive AI such as denoising, smart masking, content-aware fill, and modern autofocus benefit us photographers immensely.
 
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DBalaur said:
The long-term strategy is to legally force these companies to fall in line because they will never do so on their own.
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No can do my friend, that just keeps the honest honest. Foreign nations such as China and others are looking to be on top of the AI heap and they're getting there quickly. Do you think they'll abide by our laws and rules?? What about the scammers sitting over in <name any 3rd world country>, think they follow the rules?

Physical and logical controls on sites like this combined with cyber hygiene (not posting something you don't want out) are the only options...together with the legislation already mentioned by others.

But as Steve has already mentioned, that comes at a cost. And he's not willing to pay that bill (i.e., lock down the forum to members only).
 
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KurtH said:
No can do my friend, that just keeps the honest honest. Foreign nations such as China and others are looking to be on top of the AI heap and they're getting there quickly. Do you think they'll abide by our laws and rules?? What about the scammers sitting over in <name any 3rd world country>, think they follow the rules?

Physical and logical controls on sites like this combined with cyber hygiene (not posting something you don't want out) are the only options...together with the legislation already mentioned by others.

But as Steve has already mentioned, that comes at a cost. And he's not willing to pay that bill (i.e., lock down the forum to members only).
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Do you know who also have that mentality/fear? Every. other. country. That mentality is a very slippery slope that has never worked in a lot of issues - bringing those up would digress from the scope of this forum, though.
Wealthy, developed nations like the US are the best ones poised to introduce more regulations on these things because they have the power and leverage to influence other countries to follow suit. I'm from a 3rd world country and every development in IP and copyright laws here has been made under the pressure of international relations, not because society suddenly values art. This is not to mention that all 3 big players are from the West - 2 of which are from the US, so all the copyright issues, job loss, data pollution, and misinformation gen-AI have done so far can be traced back to the West. Regulating these companies is more akin to cleaning up the mess in your backyard in my view.
 
SCoombs said:
I would not want anything I have created used in this way. I don't care about the intellectual property aspect of things. Rather, I just don't want in any way to contribute to the dehumanization and indignification that AI technologies are bringing upon us.
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KurtH said:
Self-enforcement by the entities that are stealing content, hmmm <said jokingly sarcastic>. Unless there are mechanisms in place to actually stop (not just a warning or statement saying "do not take"), the taking of intellectual property (i.e., everyone's knowledge and photographs posted here) should be assumed to be open game by internet crawlers. And I dont see many of the AI bots stopping at a .txt file...they are out to grab as much information as possible.

AI can do some crazy stuff so the discussion question should be...is Steve actually real?
Click to expand...
Sure, Steve’s real! He and his wife were over for dinner last night…… It looked like him….mostly….. you don’t suppose……😳
 
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AI is one of many reasons why I don't post many images, especially my best, not even on my own blog. Based on prior experience I don't trust many organizations to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing -- especially where money is involved. Maybe I'm just a cynic, or maybe it's because I'm a grumpy old man who's lived long and seen a lot.
 
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