[dylan604]

As a devil's advocate, why do you trust the AI companies to behave as you suggest and not the other way? You say you have multitude of reasons, but list none. We have already seen by example that the AI companies do not care about laws and will circumvent societal norms as long as they get a leg up, so it's not a stretch to think they'd do things like this too.

[pastor_williams]

It isn't just out of the kindness of their hearts that they don't do this. There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation. I have to go through a legal and privacy process at my big corp job whenever I want to record a new timestamp and I need to ensure that the data is used appropriately and that it is wiped later. I've only seen these compliance requirements become more onerous over the past ten years and I expect that to continue.

[Terr_]

> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.

One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]

Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.

With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

[kyle-rb]

Is the reputational risk of pirating terabytes of books worse than the reputational risk of shredding (destructively scanning) millions of books?

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

[Terr_]

> Is the reputational risk of pirating [worse than] destructively scanning

Yes, actually: The blame or bad-reputation for that waste goes to US copyright law and its inanities.

[yallpendantools]

Huh? Anthropic bought the books it seems. They acquired the books fair and square. They ripped up their own books; I may hold that to be sacrilege but those aren't my books. They're not even library books. They're Anthropic's books. Why should I care if they burn the books they've legally acquired? They don't even seem to be rare or coveted copies. I'm just happy for the secondhand booksellers who made bank from the transaction.

[pastor_williams]

Fair enough. I don't use Facebook at all because I don't respect or trust the company or it's mission. I do use Gemini and Claude though.

[dylan604]

Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.

[subscribed]

Google is an ad company, I'd be very.... cautious with the trust here.

https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...

[gowld]

More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.

[latentsea]

> There are laws and regulations

Those worked very for Uber.

[gmerc]

“Rule of law”. About that…, come November.