Tuesday, 18 Mar 2025

Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems

Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems


Fresh concerns raised over sources of training material for AI systems
1.8 k views

Fresh fears have been raised about the training material used for some of the largest and most powerful artificial intelligence models, after several investigations exposed the fascist, pirated and malicious sources from which the data is harvested.

The white nationalist site VDARE is in the database, one of the 1,000 largest sites, as is the far-right news site Breitbart. The Russian state-backed propaganda site RT is one of the hundred largest providers of training data to the C4 corpus.

Few of the sites gave explicit consent to be included, although Common Crawl, the non-profit organisation that assembled the scraped data, says it respects requests to be left out of its search. Some, however, push the limits of fair use: b-ok.org, formerly known as Bookzz, was a vast repository of pirated ebooks, until it was seized by the FBI in 2022. Despite that, contents of the site remain in the C4 database.

Such vast collections of data are important to AI creation, because the large language models (LLM) that underpin tools such as ChatGPT need huge datasets to improve.

Google was approached for comment.

you may also like

Rare artifacts representing America's 250th birthday will be featured in major exhibition
  • by foxnews
  • descember 09, 2016
Rare artifacts representing America's 250th birthday will be featured in major exhibition

Rare artifacts will be featured in the "Give Me Liberty" exhibit at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond to commemorate America's upcoming 250th anniversary.

read more