If we take everything Big Tech says as a lie, then we wouldn’t be far off what is happening, rendering my recording of the examples I encounter in daily life unnecessary. We know they lie, and it would actually become more unusual to record the times they tell the truth or follow through with something. […]
Tag: copyright
XScreenSaver’s privacy policy lays bare Google’s disgraceful conduct
After saying that I wouldn’t blog about these, along comes one that is too priceless to ignore. XScreenSaver has been on the Google Play store but was facing deletion unless it included a privacy policy. Since it collected no data, its creators didn’t feel it was necessary, but as Google insisted, they wrote a cracker. […]
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Google ranks LLM-authored junk highly
One very interesting development in the whole fight against misinformation using my name is that Google won’t give me a right of reply through this blog. You’d logically think that an authoritative site would appear higher, all things being fair, but my posts about the spammy keywords don’t appear in the results. Misinformation, […]
Copyright trolling: another fishy mob to block
After four months, we received another notice from Copytrack—it must be our 14th. As usual, I went back through our digital files and sent them our licence info. But this time, I got rather fed up, since we’ve successfully proved our position 100 per cent of the time, and I think we should be whitelisted. […]
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Hellos and goodbyes
Twenty twenty-three, what a year. I’ve met some amazing people this year, a lot of whom are in the public service. You know who you are. I am happy to know you. Those who champion the good in our society. Those who offer alternatives to things that harm society. Those who create good in this […]
I have business for the photo bots, but they don’t want it
We received a few more automated notices from Copytrack last month, and as usual we were able to show them the licences. However, this one involved one of our editors, and I had to waste her time looking for documentation from a decade ago. There are some other legal issues relating to their methods, which […]
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You can’t contract yourself out of breaking the law, Google—that’s not how it works
Google has updated its privacy policy, giving itself carte blanche to take publicly available data to use for its large language models and “AI”. I don’t think whomever wrote the update has any comprehension of the law. Or that they do, but think they can get away with it. Maybe in their own country they […]
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Someone at Google did right
Fair’s fair: for once, Google did right, even though it took them ages. My last entry on this topic was in April, when Google refused to remove a pirate site that they provide cloud services for. Two months later, I received word that they had reviewed one of the URLs I had complained about: ‘We’re […]
Where do we draw the line on LLM- or “AI”-generated content?
Contrary to my earlier post, I allowed the trackbacks from AI-Summary.com after its owner reached out to me. The fact he reached out does show he read the post, and there was some human agency involved. That very courteous email even offered to remove this blog from further mining. When you know a human’s there, […]
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Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?
It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zijlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]
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