@tante i'm not surprised. not so long ago, I was responding to a toot by some EFF honcho trying to assert that "actually LLMs are not fancy autocomplete"

thread from there (original toot was deleted by the author)
https://mastodon.social/@conniptions/116995090045834771

@tante Yeah, came to that conclusion a while ago - they’re kind of free radicals (free for mee, not for thee)

@tante It's such a pity. They certainly seem to have changed course after Barlow's death.
Even though they've also done a lot of good things in the past, reading this one really hurts. :(

@tante This article from April Glaser in 2018 shed ALOT of light on the reasons for EFF's failures ... "The Watchdogs That Didn't Bark" ... Tip: Next time ya see @CoryDoctorow at a tech conference, don't let him get away with dodging these DISMAL PAST ERRORS + techno- #libertarian ideological positions ! #Reverse #Gringo #Centaur ! https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/why-arent-privacy-groups-fighting-to-regulate-facebook.html

@tante that’s a really disappointing shift from the EFF I used to know… or thought I knew.

@tante I have been wondering for a while if the EFF was being funded by Meta, Google, and Twitter. There position of child safety is particularly hard to ignore. It is basically "that's too bad, nothing at all can be done to improve child safety so we need to maintain the status quo."

My suspicions may be unfounded. I have met many people over the years who are single issue absolutist that are unable to thing rationally about the big picture. (For example, the "Right to Life crowd".) The EFF may manned by those sorts of people, but somehow I don't think so.

@tante i'll never forget how they sided with kiwifarms because a nebulous concept of free speech (that only bullies seem to deserve, but not all the people they've silenced or worse) is more important for them than queer and neurodivergent lives.

@tante I always suspected EFF. It always felt like an inside job, like a front for capitalism go-go

@tante The hard fact is that the statistical destillation process what some are calling training of LLMs is at the least partially transformative when it comes to copyright. There is precedent for that with concordances and the likes. The equally inconvenient fact is also that some of the inputs survive that process sufficiently unscathed that the result is blatant copyright infringement.