Corporate Hypocrisy: Hating Piracy While Embracing AI Data Scraping
Description
A two-panel Spongebob Squarepants meme highlighting corporate double standards regarding intellectual property. The first panel has the text "CORPORATIONS BE LIKE" and "CANT STAND PIRACY" and shows the character Squidward looking stern and disapproving. The second panel, labeled "*10 MINUTES LATER*", shows a happy Squidward next to Spongebob, with the OpenAI (ChatGPT) logo and another abstract colorful AI logo superimposed. The text below reads "ME AND THE AI SCRAPING COMPANY". The meme satirizes corporations that publicly condemn piracy and copyright infringement while simultaneously partnering with or using AI companies whose models are trained on vast amounts of scraped internet data, which often includes copyrighted material without permission. This highlights the ethical and legal gray area of AI training data, a topic of significant debate among senior engineers who understand the implications of data sourcing and intellectual property
Comments
21Comment deleted
It's not piracy if you launder the data through a multi-billion parameter model and call the output 'inference.'
The same exec who made us burn a sprint excising a GPL’d icon just green-lit vacuuming half the internet into an LLM because “embeddings aren’t copies, they’re vibes.”
The same legal teams that send DMCA takedowns for a 5-second movie clip are now arguing that scraping the entire internet for AI training is 'transformative use' - turns out the real transformation was their ethics all along
Corporations: 'Piracy is theft!' Also corporations when OpenAI offers them a check: 'Well, our robots.txt was more of a suggestion anyway. Besides, it's not scraping if we call it synthetic data partnership and get equity.'
Legal rejected a GPL snippet in my PR, then signed a seven‑figure LLM contract “trained on public web data” - enterprise‑grade robots.txt amnesia
Corporate ethics: torrents are theft; for the LLM corpus, 200 OK and a polite User-Agent apparently count as a license
Corporations: 'Piracy kills innovation!' AI team: 'Hold my Common Crawl scrape for fine-tuning.'
Absolutely. In both cases, the megacorp wins and the little guy gets stamped on, so they're happy with the hypocrisy Comment deleted
I will creatively rethink Nintendos games uwu Comment deleted
Already creatively rethinking Nintendo switch games :3 Comment deleted
I don't think the meme is referring the "AI art=theft" bullshit... The biggest AI training datasets contain a lot of sketchy stuff, because no human team can properly review them Comment deleted
How is that piracy? You think the fact that they didn't pay for that petabyte of CP is arguable in court? Comment deleted
is CP the only sketchy thing you know about? think about contents of sites like coomer.su and kemono.su there is nothing illegal in terms of type of porn, but all of it is pirated. a scrapper can easily find some rogue link on the internet and precede to download the whole thing Comment deleted
That's exactly what the meme is about? You are arguing against your own point here. Comment deleted
no, it's not against my point because "AI art=theft" doesn't care how the art is sourced, and is mostly about publicly available art. it's an argument by humanitarians who can't be bothered to figure out the difference between copying the inputs and pattern recognition Comment deleted
You are ignoring the license under which the art is "publicly available", looking like a very technically educated person (no). If we take the best case scenario for a scrapper, the CC license, most of its variants still do not allow you to use the work for any commercial purpose, while you are free to repost it on your personal pages as much as you want, or print and hang on your wall, or even train your personal network on it. It gets illegal the moment you monetize derivative work. Comment deleted
alright, that's a valid point Comment deleted
As far as I'm aware, it has never been argued in court, precisely because everyone's afraid they don't know what the court would decide Comment deleted
if it's used by corpa like in this context, duh it's gonna be monetized... Comment deleted
And that's piracy. Comment deleted
I feel like you had a strong opinion of "AI art = not piracy and morally ok" and tried to argue only the first part, which was the thing you should not have been arguing as it's pretty clear here. The meme is mainly about LLMs. Comment deleted