What Is Ours Is Ours

I watched Hank Green's Vlogbrothers video: Is Google Training AI on YouTube Videos? (The answer is, of course, yes.) It's an interesting video, so it's worth a watch, but in the end, Mr. Green makes the case that companies should understand their agreements with users in the way that those users understood those agreements when they were made.

It's an argument that resonates with many people. But it does sort of let people off the hook for understanding what these agreements are intended to do.

Nobody In Particular is not really "my" content, despite the fact that I am the person who wrote most of it, and the photographs that I post here are mine. And that's true of all of the content I generate as a user of a service. That "content," whether it's blog posts, photographs, online comments or even my Linkedin profile, really belongs to "us." And just who are "we?" For my blog, "we" is a combination of myself and Alphabet, which owns Blogger. For my LinkedIn profile, "we" is a combination of myself and Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn. For the old Live Spaces version of my blog, and the posts and photographs that were posted there, "we" as myself and, again, Microsoft. Now, in theory, Alphabet and Microsoft are "licensors" of my posts, profile and comments et cetera, but in reality, the licensing agreements that are built into the Terms of Service for these services make us co-owners. Or at least, that's the reality as Alphabet's and Microsoft's legal teams understand it. And that's pretty much the point.

I think part of what makes people upset about vacuuming masses of material written by people into LLM training data without express consent, even if only subconsciously, is that it reminds them of the poverty that they suffer for the poverty they feel. Mr. Green makes the point that migrating away from YouTube, in order to have more complete control over the contents of the video that he, and his company, Complexly, create, is non-viable. My first response to that was: "That was the entire point, Mr. Green." Because Hank Green didn't have (or, maybe, lacked the willingness to spend) the resources to buy the infrastructure to post videos and the like to the web himself, he contracted to YouTube to do it for "free." But YouTube had a price... co-ownership of everything posted. And while Mr. Green may have been under the impression that the license that YouTube demanded in exchange for not making him shell out money for server space, bandwidth et cetera, applied to uses that were extant or imaginable at the time, it's a safe bet that no-one on YouTube's legal team saw it that way. And using those videos to make themselves even more money without offering any more payment was part of the plan all along.

Alphabet is using YouTube videos to train their generative automation tools because, as far as they're concerned, those videos belong to them just as much as they do the people who created, recorded and posted them. And that prompts people to feel that something has been stolen from them. But it wasn't. They gave it away, in exchange for thinking they were getting something inexpensively.

I understand that it's likely that my posts on Nobody In Particular are also being used to train these large language models. It's part of what I signed up for, regardless of whether I was thinking about it or not. If Alphabet and Microsoft find a way to spin my words into literal gold sometime next week, I fully expect that they'll go full speed ahead with that, secure in the understanding that the license they've granted themselves will give them every right to do so.

Modern American capitalism angers so many people because it's so often built on such one-sided relationships, and in so being, reminds people that they're often on the side of the relationship that doesn't start with much of value to offer. As a result, once there is something of substantial value, the other party extracts all of it. It doesn't have to be this way, but it will require us as a population to pull together and stand together to bring collective will to bear on corporate America. But given the state of our politics, that's simply not in the cards.