[written and updated by @ech0lalia--] please read the full thing... so basically scratch is instituting an ai they dubbed the CLA and not an image generation ai. somehow many (not all) ppl now have decided that everything is fine actually. i mean, our art isn't being fed into ai? right? well, they're not, at least for now. well does this distinction even matter tho? ai requires a lot of energy and water to train and to use. this is really bad for the environment, and hence, still unethical in my eyes. it might not be as bad as the sheer wastefulness of generating an image with sora or something, and large ai companies like open ai should bear the brunt of the responsibility of this consequence, not a kid's coding website, but i see that any step in this direction by the scratch foundation will have a rather large effect considering the quantity of users on this website and sheer amount if content this ai could be trained on. hm... i wonder what adults use chat gpt for...? while it depends on the person, a way too large chunk of the population is offloading their thinking into chat gpt and other assistants. this literally was shown to cause brain atrophy as in part of ppl's brains literally died from not being used from how much they deferred their cognition to a chat bot. what makes u think that giving kids what seems to be similar tool is going to yield different results? have u seen children write essays atp? many children ik would take the easier path and not think about thier assignments, feeding them to chat gpt. this is not a great way to "to nurture curiosity, spark ideas, and deepen learning" if used in this way. AI is known to hallucinate and provide inaccurate information/bad ideas. . the CLA seems to be made to fullfil quite a few roles: "... a debugging assistant, a storytelling partner, or a discovery tool to find peers and projects, ...". I have tried the more prominent more known AIs trained and much larger databases of hundreds of years of human creation, most of which was stolen without permission as hopefully u already know, back when i was foolish and not very aware about these issues. I tried debugging while i was learning python, it was a waste of time... i left more disgruntled then when i came to it. i tried getting inspiration from AI... inspiration i never used because after wasting time with the chat bot i came up with something much better myself. many ppl got really harmful inaccurate information from AI. all in all, i doubt the tool would be very useful considering the database of scratch projects and other content on here is a much smaller than what the big dogs of AI use. all this talk about training is probably making the ai hungry... for some data to be trained on... wait where is the data coming from? ohhhh right!! prolly your code and written content... and maybe the wiki too. yes this data doesn't happen to be your art atm but that doesn't change the fact that many coders and writers are going to be taken from the same way u fear would happen to your art, and it doesn't make it better. user generated content is still licensable to scratch and they can use it however they want, the TOS change now insuiates that one thing they'll use it for is AI. this is what we had an issue with... the fact that they are using this licensed stuff to train an ai... remember? man i am getting sick of typing but i have plenty more things to say... i have had and still have an issue with how the ToS was implemented. from what ive seen, many other platforms tend to email u that they are going to start doing whatever beforehand, that way u could sort things out on ur accounts and think about the changes for the while before agreeing. scratch definitely did not do that. they placed a square on the screen infront of their users (the vast majority of which are minors ranging from really young children to teens) and gatekept their account until they agreed. really the only options provided if u weren't tech savvy enough to use inspect element to evade this were agree or u can't access the stuff u built on this website. very scummy imo. ofc there is a lot of kids out there that just agreed to it (which they can't legally do btw) to talk to their friends or continue to create on the website. do u really think most kids asked their parents? really? it's quite a shady way to get ppl agree to ur tos, scratch. another thing i would like to add is while they now aren't interested in our images and art and tbh i doubt they would be for internal use, they definitely can if they wanted to use our art... take it all up. they don't even need to notify us about it. the tos was already agreed to. if u care about ur art ur still at risk :]. idk to what extent they can get other companies like ur run of the mill open ais and midjourneys and sell them our art so i will not comment on that. it would be nice if i can opt out of training the ai...
Update: Alright announcement they gave: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/862915/ first thing they claim is that "The information Scratch collects will not include names or personal details, and it isn’t–and won’t be–used to identify individual Scratchers." and ive seen ppl decide that means they won't yoink user generated content. data is being collected... it just happens to not include things like ur location and such. they later write "We also want to assure you that right now, we are not training any AI models on Scratchers’ data." that 'right now' is doing some craaaazyyy heavy lifting there, scratch... do u guys really think that they said "By Posting User Content to or via the Service ... , you hereby grant: ... us a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license ... (to) use and exploit the User Content to provide the Service ... including through the training of AI models." just for fun? they didn't add the ai part for no reason yk. they might have not gotten to the stage in development to train it off our data *yet*, but do y'all really think that somehow when they do get there they will just spare ur code and writing out of the goodness of their heart despite having the right, according to the ToS, to use it as so? finally, about the usage of such an AI, although it still partially depends on what exactly they are cooking, i still think the ai would likely not be able to achieve their goals properly for reasons including the ones i already talked about in the "instructions" section. ...and the environment. let's not forget we kinda have this one big rock in space to live on and nowhere else, and we sharing it with other stuff if u care about such things. Also note: even if the AI works perfectly, what's even the point of this debacle? what are we here for? *ill link things that help with the code and inspo made my other users but rn am lazy hehe*
