Big Tech Giants Ratchet Up Secretive Battle for AI Training Data

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At its peak in the early 2000s, Photobucket was the world’s top image-hosting site. The media backbone for once-hot services like Myspace and Friendster, it boasted 70 million users and accounted for nearly half of the U.S. online photo market. Today only 2 million people still use Photobucket, according to analytics tracker Similarweb. But the generative AI revolution may give it a new lease of life.

“There is a rush right now to go for copyright holders that have private collections of stuff that is not available to be scraped,” said Edward Klaris from law firm Klaris Law, which says it’s advising content owners on deals worth tens of millions of dollars apiece to license archives of photos, movies and books for AI training.

Photobucket opted not to disclose potential buyers due to commercial secrecy. The ongoing, unreported negotiations suggest vast content reserves, unveiling a burgeoning data market in the race for AI dominance. Initially, tech giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft-backed OpenAI relied on freely available internet data to train AI models. While they assert the legality and ethics, lawsuits from copyright holders challenge this stance. Concurrently, these firms discreetly purchase gated content, fostering a clandestine trade encompassing chat logs and forgotten social media photos.
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