Data-Scraping Philosophy Tube Puts Ethical AI Into the Pile

CREATOR NEWSLETTER

Issue #262 | August 8, 2024

Watching the “House of the Dragon” season (?) finale (?!) on Sunday, I caught a familiar face playing Esos fleet commander Lohar. Playing the female pirate king with multiple wives was YouTuber Abigail Thorn, who is having quite a season after appearing as a Jedi in the recent Disney Star Wars show, “The Acolyte.”

While vloggers moving into pop culture is not exactly a new phenomenon, it’s particularly thrilling to see Thorn recognized in the mainstream zeitgeist. Her channel, Philosophy Tube, began in 2013 as a high-concept, irreverent answer to the prior year’s tuition price hike at UK universities and now boasts over a million subscribers. No small miracle in itself because as the name suggests, Thorn’s subjects are frequently pretty heavy…both intellectually and emotionally. In one of her most-watched uploads, “Men. Abuse. Trauma.” Thorn explores her own feelings about a recent toxic breakup, and if the title wasn’t enough of a trigger warning, her unpacking of John Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” for the first ten minutes should be enough of one: Has there ever been a bigger red flag in the discussion of exes or existence?

And yet! There’s no one I’d rather listen to tackle seemingly formidable topics, be it Islamaphobia, capital punishment, the collected works of Judith Butler and Jordan Peterson, or her Kafka-esque journey through England’s medical system as a trans woman. Her work is an approachable mix of theoretical analysis, wry humor, high production values, and deeply empathetic, anti-capitalist sentiment; Emily St. James over at Vox once described Thorn’s work as one in which “aesthetic form is inseparable from content.”

THE COMMENTS SECTION

“Nobody in the class had any idea who they were, we called them the Stupid Brothers“

– X user Emma Tolkin (@EmmaTolkin) recounting an Improv 101 experience at UCB with Logan and Jake Paul.

So why, besides her recent cameos on Max and Disney shows, am I bringing her up today? Well, Philosophy Tube was one of the YouTube 48,000 channels recently revealed to have been scraped for an illegal, large-scale data dump known as “The Pile.” OpenAI, Apple, Nvidia and Salesforce (among others) are using the Pile to further develop their deep-learning AI products without obtaining consent or offering compensation for the creators whose work is used. OpenAI and Google are now contending with a $5 million dollar lawsuit by a YouTuber on behalf of these content producers, which, as Lon Harris points out, is, uh…nothing. Like, not even a drop in the bucket for the companies, and if split between 170,000 videos that make up the pile’s training set from YouTube would be valuing them at $29 a pop.

Meanwhile, a Meta AI chatbot recently admitted to being trained not on the Pile (yay!), but a wholly separate, proprietary method called Meta Scraping and Extraction (MSaE), which included its own dataset of another 3.7 million YouTube video transcripts. (Boo!) Philosophy Tube was also among those used for MSaE.

This feels particularly unfair, seeing as the pile may very well include Philosophy Tube’s hour-long explainer, “Here’s What Ethical AI Really Means,” which itself is a response to a user taking another popular video on the channel about Effective Altruism and running it through a generative AI program to create non-consensual pornography of Thorn.

“To have someone take my writing and use it for profit – these companies are trying to get people to invest in their product, trying to get people to pay to use their product – and they have taken something that I put a little bit of my heart and soul into, and they are selling it. It makes me feel violated,” Thorn told Marketplace in regards to the pile.

Is there a solution to this thorny issue? I’d suggest supporting Thorn via Patreon and watching her videos on creator-friendly subscription streaming service Nebula. While YouTube has policies forbidding this type of scraping practice, they clearly aren’t taking the sort of action against these major companies that they do among their own users. It’s an irony that won’t escape any of the creators taking financial hits whenever their work is erroneously misidentified by the automated ContentID tool but does nothing to protect their own copyrighted work from being used to help Apple’s profit margins. 

– Drew Grant, Editorial Director

NOTED BY LON HARRIS

Is AI Stealing From YouTubers? Copyright Law Faces a New Challenge

A YouTuber’s lawsuit sparks a debate over AI’s use of unlicensed content.

By Lon Harris, Passionfruit Contributor

Open AI app over youtube logos

→ READ THE FULL STORY

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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING

YOUTUBE MADE ME DO IT

Let’s get weird with Eliot Dewberry, co-host of Internet Today, as he joins Deep Linkers to discuss his journey from ETC and Machinima to co-running his own channel with co-host Ricky Hayberg. They now explore the weird, wild world of internet culture, covering everything important, troublesome, funny, and bizarre.

Be sure to subscribe to the Passionfruit YouTube channel so you don’t miss an episode! If you’d prefer to listen in audio form, we also have a podcast feed. 

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