Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Some companies don't split because they want all internet traffic to go through their internal MITM proxies to enforce acceptable internet use and data loss policies.
reddit has been banning reddit accounts of people who use public cloud services as a vpn i.e. while travelling or in cafes, without recourse. Reddit's answer was afaik "don't do that, and create a new account."
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scrapped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
Depending on the service, you may not want it to be indexed anyway (IE login pages) or, if you do, most commercial crawlers have methods to allow site owners to verify that the traffic is a legitimate crawler and not an impersonator, see:
That wouldn't work if a sysadmin implemented the rDNS lookup mentioned in TFA. The PTR specifically must end in `.googlebot.com`, not `.googleusercontent.com`.
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content
we've spent the entire 2010s with lots of talk whether creating a scraper for google or linkedin and packaging that data to sell is illegal just for the entire thing to turn around where large companies are basically burning small servers down with requests to do the exact same thing
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
They didn't say illegal, they said wrong. And they were right. You even agree with them by saying "It's not nice". Non-nice things are wrong in some way.
And, we already live in a world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content. They can require that you log in with specific browsers running specific software on your computer, they way online schools run exam proxies.
We do not in fact live in that world. It is not illegal to violate the terms of service of a website.
A website can block Xyz user agent, put Xyz in robots.txt, or even put "No using Xyz!" in a popup and you cannot be prosecuted for using Xyz. It might be hard for you to evade their requirements, but it's not illegal.
Whether or not it's wrong is a matter of opinion. Yours differs from mine, that's fine.
US case law may not be on your side there. Generally unless you require a login to access the site (and even then you can only really ban for terms of service rather than recover damages unless they hacked around login requirements) judges have found that using scrappers on publicly served data is fair use. It gets murkier with creative content (rather than straight data) in what they can do with it after scrapping but the scrapping itself would still be 'legal' in the they can do it without judicial consequence sense.
The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.
The effect is a denial of service. Service is denied because the server is overloaded. The intent is at best callous indifference and at worst is copyright infringement.
It’s comparable to broadcasting radio interference as a side effect of some industrial process. If a company were to do that they’d be slapped down hard by the FCC. The unfortunate reality we live in is that we have no equivalent regulation on the internet. Thus the situation has become a tragedy of the commons: small websites suffer denial of service due to unsustainable and unwanted bot traffic.
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
> Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
You may remember from 2021 that Microsoft's Copilot would gladly regurgitate the GPL-licensed Quake 3 source code, without giving you any indication it got it from there or that the GPL applies.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Except someone can explicitly licence their content saying "this cannot be used for training models, or you're violating the licence you used to download it in the first place".
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
If you believe in karmic justice, someone who lacked sufficient morals should just lose an argument even if they are now trying to use morals to put forward a sound argument.
You cannot use a moral high ground unless you’ve earned that high ground through your past behavior.
If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Yep, this is basically the outlook of ChatGPT etc in america, when they try and stop china scraping them. I hope they go bust as soon as possible.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
Their infringement is different, and would really be a trademark issue if we hadn’t just invented the idea of copyrighting a character separately from the story they are a part of in the ‘30s (they are not individually copyrightable under the original text).
There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.
It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.
"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history, I'm sure they're not "good guys". But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
I've seen my son play Sonic the Hedgehog games in Roblox that were straight rips from the original games (at least visually and play-wise). I'm not really sure how it was done (extracting actual assets from the game, or just a dedicated user very familiar with the original game), but there are quite a few recreations of other games on Roblox that are just as good as the originals.
I think this is an important point we need to grapple with more and more in the future. We like to think an act as either lawful or not lawful, either ethical or not ethical. We need to bring in scale as a separate axis. There's a world of difference whether an activity is done at human scale or machine scale. At human scale, it's an act of deviance that may contribute to the diversity of human experience. At machine scale, it's a distortion that threatens the society.
The internet was built on aggregators and crawlers, it only matters when people are not getting paid... I prefer the internet to be unregulated, but whatever greed always wins
I have a question/thought/philosophy. If AES is a relatively strong encryption method right now, _why don't we wait to crack the assets until the encryption method is easy to decrypt_? By the time that's possible, the game assets will likely be old as shit, so it would potentially sit better with everyone. If we wait, it takes on a more archival type feeling.
I understand importance of preservation, but frankly, the English WWW seem to massively and simultaneously overestimate rarity and undervalue financial costs of creative assets like 3D models and 2D images.
It's not rare that these assets cost in ranges of $10k and made in less than dozen man-hours each. They're not harvested and collected, but artificially created by individuals by work orders or as their own projects. A lot of these conversation feels like people are talking about something similar to Louvre collection items that cannot be obtained other than by somewhat illicit means, leading to discussions of which illicit means will be tolerated in the name of preservation.
No, it's something they make as we speak on Blender. Like with a mouse and a keyboard, or sometimes with a pen tablet. I think the anglosphere Internet hasn't yet reached the point where justification of dubious means can be discussed; we're at the phase where it should be educated to people more often that these are man-made creations that each has economic values.
I think you are missing the point here. The art assets in question belong to the studio. Yes, they are painstakingly made. They are made with the assistance of some very very expensive technologies. Full body scans. Facial rigging with 180 high fps cameras. Mocap suits and props in a full blown warehouse studio. The works. It's not just a 3D model. It's a rigged 3d digital twin of an actor. There's image rights, etc that have to be negotiated and deals made. Preservation would be to preserve the data as is rather than reworking it into a blender scene.
Without getting into the much debated philosophy of restoration/display of preserved things and how restoration can often cause degradation to the original piece, consider that just preserving the data in the manner you suggest also requires preserving the original software if you ever want to view it. Which requires not just preserving that original software but also all the external hardware and software that original software relies on. Quite often that's a dead end as it requires preserving an activation/license server that the preservers don't have access to.
That isn’t true, you preserve the data as is for the software as is. You can emulate under it if you need to run it. This is what internet archive has done and the proper preservation of the media is in tact. In NO WAY do you ever need to convert the data back to a workable source in its original authoring program.
According to the timestamp, that was uploaded less than 24 hours ago.
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
their staff posts these things. their staff creates videos of how to rip assets from games. they are fully aware of what their users are doing and they openly encourage it.
This is the kind of misinformation that spreads around the internet without ever being fact checked.
Theft is the action or crime of stealing. The fact that some definitions include the concept of "with the intent to deprive the original owner of it" doesn't make digital theft not a theft.
Also, it could be argued that the theft of the IP is further substantiated by the loss of future potential revenue from that IP, as, after all, why would anyone pay the orignal owner and creator actual money when an AI agent will make an exact duplicate of said item and possibly further customize it for them as part of its already paid for product catalog?
I mean, it's not misinformation, though it may be incomplete. Taking the us example, in most states the larceny statute—the "crime" of theft, as you put it—does in fact require an intent to permanently deprive. Unlawful copying is not larceny or theft and no da could prosecutor could prosecute it under a larceny statute. It may of course be copyright infringement, which some people rhetorically analogize to theft. That analogy may be useful for some purposes, including for motivating normative intuitions. But it's categorically different as a matter of law.
The internet must understand one simple rule. What’s downloadable will always be downloaded. There are plenty of people who don’t give a flying fk about your LICENSE.md, robots.txt, ToS and whatnot. It’s like leaving your bicycle unlocked in public. Even if there is a giant cardboard next to it saying: “please, don’t steal” - nobody cares.
Scientists say this is the first occurance of the word "model" in the title of a post on HN that does not refer to a neural network of some sort since 2023
You laugh, but this is the kind of data that allows you to train models that actually catch a lot of corner cases, as well as generalizing to other 3D applications.
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
As photographer, I find it hard to work with your model. It's like it has no training and just sits there waiting to be told what to do. I spend more time explaining what I want the model to do than actually working with the model. Maybe I should shell out for a professional model instead of working the the open models hoping to be a professional one day.
The entire article points the finger at "roblox" as an entity, but the behavior seems to indicate it's just an individual doing the scraping - possibly not for corp use.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
It's certainly possible, but I'd say the evidence fits the opposite explanation more: if it was not for business purposes, why do it on your work machine, during working hours, with your work email address in the User-agent?
> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadI think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
No they didn't. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32337698
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scrapped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
Most our sites don’t need to be in Google anyway.
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
(Though restricting the Google UA to only legitimate Google IPs seemingly would break Brave's crawler, though that's their own fault: https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler/)
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduc...
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...
https://kagi.com/bot
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
To a certain extent, it already has. YouTube for Kids and regular YouTube are worlds apart.
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
we've spent the entire 2010s with lots of talk whether creating a scraper for google or linkedin and packaging that data to sell is illegal just for the entire thing to turn around where large companies are basically burning small servers down with requests to do the exact same thing
it is in fact engineering incompetence and loose engineering, if you cant handle a burst of traffic
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
I don't see a problem
> ignored our Terms of Service
ban them from the service then and case closed?
> and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only
because it's been proven they have been used commercially?
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
It's not nice. It is, however, not illegal.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
And, we already live in a world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content. They can require that you log in with specific browsers running specific software on your computer, they way online schools run exam proxies.
A website can block Xyz user agent, put Xyz in robots.txt, or even put "No using Xyz!" in a popup and you cannot be prosecuted for using Xyz. It might be hard for you to evade their requirements, but it's not illegal.
Whether or not it's wrong is a matter of opinion. Yours differs from mine, that's fine.
It is wrong to pretend you are deaf to get out of an awkward conversation. No one is going to put cuffs on you for that.
Ignoring robots.txt is not wrong. That's my opinion, just as valid as yours.
It also happens that the legal system agrees with my opinion of the wrongness of this act.
Also, you did say this:
> where website owners can legally dictate
Which is, as I pointed out, false.
I can’t go scrape New York Times articles and make copies of them without first licensing them from NYT.
Unless copyright law has been entirely repealed?
It’s comparable to broadcasting radio interference as a side effect of some industrial process. If a company were to do that they’d be slapped down hard by the FCC. The unfortunate reality we live in is that we have no equivalent regulation on the internet. Thus the situation has become a tragedy of the commons: small websites suffer denial of service due to unsustainable and unwanted bot traffic.
Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.
Progress is one thing, injustice is another.
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
https://open3dlab.com/project/e2a0830d-f166-4b1b-aabf-8ca735...
Just an example, there's plenty more on the frontpage.
I have nothing against these guys, but I just can't understand the moral high ground of the complaint.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
You cannot use a moral high ground unless you’ve earned that high ground through your past behavior.
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
There’s a substantive difference between ingesting other people’s work and hosting copies of fans knockoff models of their favorite characters.
It’s even weirder because in other mediums this wouldn’t even be a thing. Nobody gets nearly as up in arms about fans doing their own cuts of movies, or re-using characters in written fan fiction, or etc. Very odd to me how up in arms people get about this specifically for visual art.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history, I'm sure they're not "good guys". But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
What nuance am I missing?
more radicalization towards AI
Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)
(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).
It's not rare that these assets cost in ranges of $10k and made in less than dozen man-hours each. They're not harvested and collected, but artificially created by individuals by work orders or as their own projects. A lot of these conversation feels like people are talking about something similar to Louvre collection items that cannot be obtained other than by somewhat illicit means, leading to discussions of which illicit means will be tolerated in the name of preservation.
No, it's something they make as we speak on Blender. Like with a mouse and a keyboard, or sometimes with a pen tablet. I think the anglosphere Internet hasn't yet reached the point where justification of dubious means can be discussed; we're at the phase where it should be educated to people more often that these are man-made creations that each has economic values.
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
Theft is the action or crime of stealing. The fact that some definitions include the concept of "with the intent to deprive the original owner of it" doesn't make digital theft not a theft.
Also, it could be argued that the theft of the IP is further substantiated by the loss of future potential revenue from that IP, as, after all, why would anyone pay the orignal owner and creator actual money when an AI agent will make an exact duplicate of said item and possibly further customize it for them as part of its already paid for product catalog?
Lmao!
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
How’s that for a throw back
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.