Because I was reminded this week that the etymology of “Matrix” is not widely known…

I’m old enough to remember when US policy was to enable uncensored access to the internet in repressive regimes. Now we’re brokering the sale of foreign platforms to prevent people from learning about genocide. And once again, this was a bipartisan effort, begun by Trump, signed into law by Biden, and concluded under Trump.

Flash back to the most ominous coat check claim ticket I’ve ever received.

And if Wikimedia did win on that, it could have awful unintended consequences for free culture in other kinds of cases.

That’s before we even get to the fact that Wikipedia is freely licensed under CC By-SA. Training ML models is permitted by the license, without a doubt. The only arguable question is whether the outputs (or far less likely, the models themselves) may sometimes be derivative works of the data.

Mostly, they’re probably not. Litigating the question would be ungodly expensive and Wikimedia would likely lose, and would surely get less than an outcome definitively resolving the issue in its favor.

Training ML models on copyright-protected works is probably fair use. LLM creators have banked heavily on this, and so far have won on it. I understand why many people don’t like that result, but it’s the same basic doctrine that gave us great things like useful search engines (remember those?). To get a different result for LLMs, we’d probably need to fundamentally undermine the fair use doctrine, and I’m not remotely convinced that’s a baby we want to throw out.

I understand that some people are leery of any association with AI services. But the way I see it, Wikimedia had two options: (1) get some money from the companies that train on Wikipedia content, or (2) watch them do it anyway and be poor and mad about it. I’m glad they got the money.

Reviewing a SaaS provider’s public Terms of Service, which prohibit either party from disclosing the terms of the agreement without the other party’s express written consent. A self-violating contract, truly impressive work.

BYOD (be your own dentist)

You may be able to indict a ham sandwich, but not always the man who throws it.
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