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The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
(stackdiary.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Don't let the Firefox fanboys cloud your judgement with their constant shilling. Most of the claims in the article have been retracted after Brave responded, and the issue didn't affect users anyway.
Also, Brave is a completely independent search engine now, which is why they have web crawlers like the guy in the article is complaining about. And speaking of a distributed crawler, Brave Browser has an opt-in feature for that where sites you visit will be indexed by Brave Search.
Brave Search is the only real contender to be an actual competitor for Google Search, but these Firefox fanatics have such a hate boner for Brave they just want to see it fail. All of their arguments against Brave really aren't serious and don't affect users at all.
I mean personally for myself, was gonna use Firefox regardless- I'd rather support the open source option and web engine that isn't chromium based; the question for me was whether to use brave search, and if brave search was providing rights to web content to those who'd like to use it for AI training. I had generally liked brave search okay as my google replacement (though I will say I tired quant looking for a brave alternative because of this article, and qwant is pretty good too! I've been impressed!)
Not disclosing sites are being crawled is iffy, but I genuinely do understand the justification given in the email reply that the article updated to add- as long as they're not selling rights to other people's content for AI training.
I'm a little out of my depth here from a technical perspective so that probably doesn't help, but honestly between the comment provided by brave and the original authors interpretation of the email response they received, the whole situation feels pretty muddy. The author and brave seem to be kind of fundamentally at odds about what they're describing brave as doing, so it's a little hard to gauge. Even if brave is accurately describing the product they provide ("it's an api you can make calls to to get ai outputs based on web content") which doesn't seem totally consistent with some of the descriptions on their api products page, it still feels somewhat ambiguous because of the fact that websites can't opt out of their content being provided through an api, whether it's been filtered through a LLM or not. It all seems very, very mudy; hard to make heads or tails of. I'll be curious to see any additional updates to the article.
That's not true, the author pretty explicitly maintained the most important claims...
So...? You can do unethical things without it affecting the user...? There's an argument to be had around whether it's unethical, but it not affecting the user is frankly kinda irrelevant.
Indeed! That's why I was using them. If folks are looking for a brave alternative with their own index though, I'd say qwant has seemed very competitive, and it like their interface even better, though they do lack the helpful ai summary tool- perhaps both for better and worse.
That's definitely not what he was complaining about. He was complaining about how they're crawling the web. Tons of people have crawlers, but most do a better job of respecting website consent than brave seems to (even if brave may have understandable reasons, which they might), and that's especially important given the broader context of the story.
Yes, that's exactly what I was referring to... It's a cool feature, and I wish Firefox would implement it and maybe use the results to make an open source web index that any alternative search engines could use to supplement their own indexes in order to support competition with bing and google.
That's an entirely baseless assertion, I literally listed 3 alternatives to brave, all of which have their own index (and I'm pretty sure there are others, but I may be mistaken), and of those 3 I'd say qwant provides very competitive search results with brave, maybe even better. I plan to keep testing them but its cool for there to be more than one decent private search engine that isn't a meta search!
That's the second time you make this argument and it still doesn't matter. If were to steal the entirety of other people's content and copy it 1-1 without attribution that doesn't affect users either, but that sure as hell doesn't mean its okay. And I already explained that it genuinely is ambiguous whether what brave is doing is okay- if they're selling people's content to train large language models, that's definitely serious, and for right now it does remain kinda ambiguous whether they're doing that or not
I get that you're frustrated and feel like people are biased against something you like, but getting angry, making poor arguments to defend a corporation that doesn't care about any of us, and calling everyone who says they prefer not to support Brave is more shill-like behavior than the folks you're frustrated with, it might be worth dialing it back a bit.
Edit: adjusted wording for accuracy, and some of my original wording felt a little more passive aggressive than it need end to be (and some of it kinda still is but I'm tired and don't wanna edit more ๐ apologies for tone that comes across as somewhat hostile)
just a few counter points:
brave is open source too
AI copyright precident has not been set by courts, there is no precident for any of this. i don't see why this is such a big deal you'd stop using their search.
As a pirate, I think copyright law is bullshit anyway and holds us back as a species. Most copyright law is outdated and stunts creativity and innovation
most people only care if it affects them. which this does not. it is relevant because that is how people operate if they're not virtue signaling
there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. every large organization does some shady shit. Brave in comparison to most hasn't done anything to warrant such a huge campaign against them. maybe some criticism, sure.
I meant brave is the only good alternative to Google. all the others have terrible results. Brave is almost as good as google
and I'm not defending a corporation, I am just tired of Firefox fans jumping on any small thing and making a mountain out of a molehill to try and save their dying browser market share
also no idea why you think I'm angry about this. I'm just annoyed at the constant Firefox circlejerk/astroturfing campaign
I actually didn't realize that, thank you for pointing that out to me. I do generally feel better about supporting Mozilla's web engine since otherwise chromium has a monopoly and google has generally been shitty with the power that has granted them in the market, and Mozilla has generally done a great job of championing a free, open, and inter-compatible internet, but that's a personal choice on my part; chromium will be better suited to the needs of plenty of users ๐คท๐ป
I don't really agree that because something isn't illegal its therefore okay. Especially when its because laws haven't has a chance to catch up. But regardless, laws don't determine whether something is good or right.
I generally agree, I think modern copyright law is broken as all fuck and only exists to further the interests of massive companies at the expense of everyone else. But I do think its important for people who do creative labor to be able to profit off of doing so, which requires some amount of protection since intellectual labor can be copied without doing the labor again. Coming up with a novel idea or writing an article requires creative labor, but copying them does not, as opposed to like manufacturing a physical product, which generally requires the same effort and resources to reproduce (all other factors being equal). But modern interpretation of intellectual property law is complete and utter bullshit, I 100% agree. That being said, if brave is selling people's content that required intellectual labor to produce, personally I find that pretty unequivocally wrong, the question is whether that's the actually the case here, and the nature of AI, plus the ambiguity around the specifics of this situation, really muddy the water.
I absolutely disagree that anyone who cares about issues that don't directly affect them is virtue signalling- to me the term 'virtue signaling' intrinsically implies that someone's care about an issue is disingenuous or insincere. And I also think that only caring about issues that directly affect you is a horrible way to go through life. I'm getting the impression that we may have somewhat fundamentally different worldviews on this subject; to me, caring about things that are harmful or damaging to others even if they don't affect me directly is a moral imperative unless I wish to loose any shred of respect I may have for myself. I think we could go back and forth on whether most people do or don't actually care about issues that don't directly affect them, but I am generally of the mind that people should. If you look at this differently I understand, and am more than happy to chalk this up to a difference in worldviews.
I don't think that just because nothing can be perfect that one option can't be less bad than another. That being said, I'm really not super in the loop on any controversies that have happened with Brave though, I honestly have no idea whether they've been involved in past wrongdoing or not. I've definitely seen bad press they've gotten, and I'd never really enjoyed how closely integrated crypto stuff is with their browser (I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with crypto, it's just been involved in so many scams it makes me warry at this point, especially if it's showing up somewhere that doesn't feel like it belongs like a browser) but that was never a big enough deal that I felt it should affect whether I use something of theirs like a search engine. If this turns out to be nothing then I'll likely just decide between qwant and brave based on preference, I'm curious to continue comparing them and see how they stack up against each other.
That's fair, that's what I understood you to mean, I just don't know that I agree it's the only meaningful competitor. Though I do certainly agree there aren't many, and brave is among the best options. Like I said, I'm genuinely really curious to continue comparing brave, qwant, and probably also mojeek though so far it hasn't impressed me as much. I think there may have been others I considered before going with Brave I could continue comparing, but I'd need to find them again. Techlore on YouTube said he ended up picking brave for search so when I got tired of duckduckgo, I kinda just ended up using Brave.
I can understand that frustration. Personally I'm super happy with Firefox and am glad to support it, but I think the open source world in general can kinda just "be like that" sometimes when they feel its better to support one project or another. I often agree with them on what I'd like to support, but I do think there are helpful and unhelpful ways to express one's opionons on that kinda subject, and people often express them in a way that just kinda sucjs sucks. I think its kinda just an eventuality that discourse ends up that way, given the open source community's particular cultural mix of genuine care about supporting good projects, varrying levels of "moral superiority" mindset about said projects they support, and the echo chamber aspect of any online community with lots of people sounding off about what they think and why. It really can get frustrating, especially if you're supporting a project that isn't what the general majority has chosen to support.
I appreciate your willingness to engage in sincere discussion with me :)
Thanks for the understanding and reasonable reply. I also appreciate the thoughtful discussion.
I don't even dislike Firefox, I have it installed on my PC and my phone alongside Brave. And I don't think Brave is completely undeserving of criticism either, just not to the extent that it is portrayed at large.
Of course. Always nice to have real conversation with someone online ๐
And get what you're saying, I'll be keeping what you've had to say in mind as I see more of that discussion about brave. Its not the right fit for me, but I'm not going to begrudge anyone making the choice that's right for them.
Hope you have a great day!