You can quibble about the ethics of web scraping for ML in general but I think you're conflating issues.

OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content. What Google cares about here is the learnings from OpenAI's proprietary RLHF dataset, for which they had to contract a large sum of human labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use.

> OpenAI and Google both scour the web for human-generated content

OpenAI and Google both scour the web for content, period. That content could be human generated or AI generated or a mix of the two. Neither company is respecting copyright or terms of service of every individual bit of data collected. Neither company cares how much effort was put into creating the data, whether humans were paid to do it, or whatever else. So there really isn't that much difference between the two.

And herein is the main problem of AI. Its creators consume knowledge from the commons, and give nothing free and unencumbered back.

It's like the guy who never brings anything to the potluck, but after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart.

> after everyone finishes eating, he boxes up the leftovers, and starts selling them out of a food cart.

That particular example doesn't seem all that great, as it gives the impression of not letting food go to waste.

Though sure, the guy could just give the food away, but shrug.

So what? Is OpenAI RLHF dataset more valuable than millions of books and paintings OpenAI used for free without stopping a second? Why is that? Because one big tech corp paid money for that dataset?

If there's a party which has intentionally conflated scraping web content in general with scraping it to build a direct competitor to the original sources, that party is Google.

Yes, this latest instance with OpenAI outputs is shady, but I think it's in the same spirit as scraping news organizations for content which journalists were paid to write, and then showing portions of it directly in response to queries so people don't go directly to the news organization's pages, and it's in the same spirit as showing answers to query-questions that are excerpts from scraped pages which another organization paid to produce.

I see no difference. Any web scraping is a means to deflect revenue-generating traffic to yourself, and away from other websites. Fewer people will go to Stack Overflow because of Codex and Copilot. The point that the content was paid for vs volunteered becomes moot once it's posted publicly online for free, on ShareGPT.

> labelers. Finding a roundabout way to extract the value of a direct competitor's purpose-built, costly data feels meaningfully different from scraping the web in general as an input to a transformative use

There we go again, its, one law for the unwashed plebs and the other for us.

Why do you think that I, after spending my time and effort to write my blog, own my content to a lesser extent that OpenAI does their? Such hypocracy.

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

forgive me if i have limited sympathy when a burglars house gets robbed

This

It's even less worthy of sympathy - like a counterfeit piece of art being counterfeited. And there isn't even an original, just like a made up counterfeit.

That's not how rights work, though. I'm sure you don't want your rights to be conditional on the sympathy of others.

good thing I'm just some guy expressing an opinion, and not a judge, then

It’s still debatable if training a computer neutral network on public data is 'wrong' when we very much accept it as a right for biological neural networks.