Should AI Companies Be Allowed to Train Models on Public Internet Content?

If we ban training on public data, we don't stop AI; we just ensure that AI only represents the wealthy and the powerful (https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/10/licensed-data-bias-ai/). If companies can only train on data they explicitly buy, they will buy the archives of the New York Times, Getty Images, and academic journals. They won't buy the blogs, forums, and public posts of average people, minorities, or marginalised groups. The resulting AI models will be incredibly biased, represen...

We need to consider the 'Right to be Forgotten.' If I post something stupid on a public forum when I'm 16, I can delete it when I'm 25. But if an LLM scraped that post in 2023, those words are permanently baked into the weights of the model. You cannot 'delete' data from a trained neural network without retraining the entire multi-million dollar model from scratch (which companies won't do) (https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00939). Public scraping destroys the human right to evolve and erase our past....

Also, 'representing my worldview' doesn't pay my rent. If an AI company uses my portfolio to train an image generator that puts me out of work, I don't care how 'diverse' the model is. I care that I was robbed.