Article by Dave Lee: “Having scraped just about the entire sum of human knowledge, ChatGPT and other AI efforts are making the same rallying cry: Need input!
One solution is to create synthetic data and to train a model using that, though this comes with inherent challenges, particularly around perpetuating bias or introducing compounding inaccuracies.
The other is to find a great gushing spigot of new and fresh data, the more “human” the better. That’s where social networks come in, digital spaces where millions, even billions, of users willingly and constantly post reams of information. Photos, posts, news articles, comments — every interaction of interest to companies that are trying to build conversational and generative AI. Even better, this content is not riddled with the copyright violation risk that comes with using other sources.
Lately, top AI companies have moved more aggressively to own or harness social networks, trampling over the rights of users to dictate how their posts may be used to build these machines. Social network users have long been “the product,” as the famous saying goes. They’re now also a quasi-“product developer” through their posts.
Some companies had the benefit of a social network to begin with. Meta Platforms Inc., the biggest social networking company on the planet, used in-app notifications to inform users that it would be harnessing their posts and photos for its Llama AI models. Late last month, Elon Musk’s xAI acquired X, formerly Twitter, in what was primarily a financial sleight of hand but one that made ideal sense for Musk’s Grok AI. It has been able to gain a foothold in the chatbot market by harnessing timely tweets posted on the network as well as the huge archive of online chatter dating back almost two decades. Then there’s Microsoft Corp., which owns the professional network LinkedIn and has been pushing heavily for users (and journalists) to post more and more original content to the platform.
Microsoft doesn’t, however, share LinkedIn data with its close partner OpenAI, which may explain reports that the ChatGPT maker was in the early stages of building a social network of its own…(More)”