If you are in favor of AI, please keep any debates respectful and provide sound evidence to back up your case. If you are not in favor of AI, please be respectful to those who have differing opinions than yours. Thank you. -- "We aim to lead the way in introducing generative AI tools for kids that amplify their creativity rather than replacing it." -- The Scratch Team Blog In the latest update to the Scratch Privacy Policy, one of the terms is that everything you post can be used to train MIT's new AI model- comments, instructions, lines of code, assets inside projects, everything. Any asset uploaded, created, or put anywhere on scratch can be used. The rumors were true after all, huh. I'm very miffed about this news. As someone who doesn't read the terms of service like 99% of the population, I hit agree without thinking. My projects are probably being scraped for data as we speak. There's no way to opt out, no way to cancel this agreement. It's a one and done deal, so now that I've accepted, there's no going back. But why does Scratch Team need to train off of the creations of minors? It makes no sense to me. The truth is, Scratch Team has been using our data to train AI for internal affairs since May of 2023. But now they're opening it commercially, so if you post anything on Scratch, you permanently and irrevocably give Scratch permission to copy it, modify it, share it, let others use it, and use it to train AI or machine learning without paying you or asking again. Basically, this means that instead of using what you make strictly inside of MIT, they can get rich by selling your personal creations to AI billionaire companies. I was fine with them using what I make inside of their company since they weren't trying to make profit off of my creations. But now that they're selling what we make to whatever AI companies they signed a contract with- it's kind of like we're giving them stuff to sell but they're not paying us back. I feel like it's too nice to put it as volunteering our creations, but I can't think of any other way to put it. There's no way to fight back. Scratch Team probably doesn't care if we get upset because they can still profit off of what we make. Scratch is a site for coders, after all, and we artists are a minority. I'm sure there's many people upset about this, but there's still many others who are in favor of this and even more who are ignorant. There's just no way they'd back out of a contract just because a bunch of minors, not even adults, got mad and told them to. If they could be wavered by us speaking out, then they wouldn't have signed those contracts in the first place. So what can we do to protect our creations? I'm sorry because this isn't what you want to hear, but there is no way to save your creations from being scraped other than not posting them at all. Not just on scratch, but everywhere. Bots constantly scrape the internet for information, and there's always going to be a bot that uses the information gathered to train AI. Even technology like artshields are being rendered obsolete because AI constantly is advancing. As much as I hate to admit it, there isn't a corner of the internet where your creations won't be used to train AI. Even if your website's ToS says it doesn't allow data gathered to be used by AI, the big corporations don't care about 1 little independent website owner. The only way to keep your art safe from AI is to not post it at all. Sorry I couldn't say anything more optimistic, but it's the sad truth of things, and unlike AI, I will tell you the bleak truth, not what you wanna hear. But yeah, I'm a little miffed that a site centered around creativity has done this. There's not enough regulations around AI because it's too new a technology. But remember this: Art has been around since the dawn of humanity. Even through the Dark Ages and through advancements thought to replace art such as photography, it has prevailed. There's no way that art will be removed from this world because of AI, and even if it becomes impossible to make a living off of art, there will always be talented individuals who pursue art nonetheless. -- So you know how people jailbreak AI models and completely erase their moral compasses? I'm assuming that Scratch AI will not be explicitly trained off of this website so it will have some pretty horrible things in its training database. Some kids could be introduced to bad stuff if the moral compass fails, and even enormous and successful corporations like OpenAI can have their AI manipulated into saying barbaric things. Just some more things to be worried about, you're welcome ^^ (not really. I'm actually very scared and very upset that my brain thought of that.) Also random side note, I've gotten 140 messages total regarding the AI issue ☠☠☠ the only reason my inbox isn't totally dead is because I was online for most of it and was checking it every few minutes
Some of the information in this project has been proven to be outdated! There has been lots of controversy regarding this topic and I have admittedly been misled regarding a few things. Anyways, please take some things in this project with a grain of salt! I can confirm that all of my information about the web outside of scratch is correct, just not information specifically about scratch.