
Sigh…
I have failed to use Brave in the past, despite its attractions, because of its Basic Attention Token blockchainery. The availability of AI summaries confirms my decision.
Brave has gone to court to head off potential legal action from News Corp over the browser maker's auto-generated AI summaries of articles published by Rupert Murdoch's media empire. More specifically, the software house this week requested [PDF] a declaratory judgment from a federal judge in San Francisco against the owner of …
Small hint, the way these companies use "legitimate interest" isn't actually allowed, nor would they need to have a switch for "legitimate interest" items because the only way those would be allowed is if the site can't work without it (and they then have to tell the user exactly what is being stored and why). They're just hoping you something think "legitimate interest" means something and leave the switch on. The problem is that the use of this has been a bit vaguely defined (though the spirit of the law is extremely clear) and no-one has so far bothered to take these scumbags to task for it.
Can't believe I'm backing Rupert Murdoch over Brave
I think it tells you something about yourself.
Rupert Murdoch is a very old experienced business person. I do not lose any sleep worrying about his business.
I do worry about people who believe that the way to save journalism is to artificially restrict the tools people have for consuming it. If the newspaper thinks it is good business to make (some of) their content available for free, they can't complain when someone reads it and summarises it for others. All newspapers do that all the time, after all.
The technology that can do that without a person involved is the Jacquard Loom of publishing. Yes, it will destroy some things, and it will enable others. There will be big changes for the people who's livelihoods depend on the old way of doing things. But that is inevitable.
Ideally, I'd like to split this up. Indexing for a search engine should be allowed use. And it is, that's been decided in court. Use for AI should not be allowed. My ideal solution is that they be forbidden from training their AI on it but still allowed to index it for search. If training the AI is important enough, and I doubt it is, they can pay to license that.
And on the topic of Google, that goes for them too. I want the cases to decide that search indexes stay, training Gemini must get another license. I have reason to believe that this is already required by law, but courts haven't decided whether it is or not. There are several lawsuits challenging exactly this behavior.
I can't say I know anything about Brave's summaries specifically, as I haven't used Brave Search in a hot minute (I waver between Google and DuckDuckGo), but in theory it would be nice to get a straight answer out of a news headline instead of all the clickbait. Don't you just love when a headline teases a question that grabs your attention, and the article doesn't answer that question until you're three or four paragraphs in? I know I don't.
That's not me defending Brave's summaries specifically, as I haven't even seen them myself, but that's one benefit that AI summaries in general could bring to the table.
It would be lovely if all the worlds news could be summarised in single headlines. However, the world is complex and if you want to understand it you need to read more than headlines, however well written.
You need to seek out good journalism, expecting the magic AI to make it simple for you isn't going to work.
Apart from anything else, studies show that AI summaries are often shit.
Of course. All that is true. But that doesn't mean that AI summaries are not useful.
Many people, on many occasions, have no interest in a particular point , and an AI summary can mean that they still learn something or help them decide whether the article is something worth reading (now or later).
I'm no fan of the rubbish that is called "AI" today. But I realise that even today's crap AI can have some uses, on some occasions, for some people.
Except when the AI summary says something the article doesn't, for instance that someone died who is still very much alive, and they decide that the summary is good enough and start acting on that summary. Enough people do that already with human-generated falsehoods. I see no benefit in attaching an automatic system to augment that with an added random element.
Everyone knows Rupert's eleventy billion years old*. In fact, he just celebrated his birthday on March 11. Many happy returns, chief.
C.
* 94.
(I confess, I've worked for Viscount Rothermere. I've worked for Sly Bailey. But I've never worked for Murdoch, though I was quoted in the final NOTW as a friend was doing news desk shifts for them and needed to fill some space, and I had a story in The Sun ages ago about university security guards gawking at students through their bedroom windows using well-placed CCTV cameras.)
If Brave has a database that big, they will either make an AI agent with it, or sell out. That's a lot of data hoarding. No way they are going to stay innocent. My guess is a big fish buys it. This is all about money for murdoch. He is going to have a very high priced lawyer, and high priced lawyers can do black magic in a court room. I would not doubt it if this case goes up the courts.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, Robert Maxwell (aka Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch), a wheeler/dealer in publishing, was famous for suing anybody who criticised him. Litigation was a tool to prevent gossip about his nasty nature and dodgy business transactions becoming widely known. A repeated victim of Ján Hoch's malice was the satirical magazine 'Private Eye'.
Ján Hoch managed to keep the lid on his despicable character until his death. He drowned at sea in 1991. He fell, or was pushed, off his private yacht; nobody was inclined to probe deeply. Immediately upon hearing of Hoch's death, news media offered a deluge of no-holds-barred revelations. It was an orgy of joyful release after the bully's death.
Maybe, there is something about owning newspapers and publishing houses which brings out the basest instincts. Murdoch has not as yet fallen into the water, so we can't know whether those who malign him are knaves or truth-tellers. However, Murdoch's frequent visits to 10 Downing Street raised speculation about his motivations, particularly so in the long period during which he hobnobbed with Mr (call me Sir Tony) Blair.
A disrespectful person penned the following fantasy about Rupert Murdoch's much anticipated encounter with St Peter.
-----
St Peter: What do you think qualifies you for a place in Heaven?
Murdoch: I am very rich. That is, I didn't bury my talents. Jesus will confirm that.
St Peter: Correction, you were very rich. Don't you recall something about a camel and the eye of a needle?
Murdoch: I didn't have much time to hang around in churches.
St Peter: That hardly helps, does it? Try another tack.
Murdoch: I persuaded British politicians to do the right thing.
St Peter: You mean you bought British politicians. Anyway, what was the "right thing"?
Murdoch: It was grasping that dissemination of news and entertainment should only be in the hands of those propagating decent values. That must surely be God's wish?
St Peter: Do you mean the 'News of the World' and various morally dubious tacky channels available through Sky TV? Oh, come to think of it, up here we did enjoy 'Eurotrash'. However, you have said nothing yet to justify a place in Heaven. On the contrary, you are displaying the qualities of a carpetbagger and 'wide-boy'.
Murdoch: Oh, you have misunderstood my intention. I thought you would expect an honest man to be open about his sins and reticent over his appealing qualities.
St Peter: Far too reticent. We have nothing favourable about you on file. Yet that could be an oversight. Tell me, have you ever done a simple act of kindness unconnected with making money? For instance, taking in a stray kitten.
Murdoch: (a very long silence)
NARRATOR: We must leave it there because Murdoch has gone into catatonic trance whilst dredging through the murky depths of his memory.
I assume on the evidence that outcome of the interview with Heaven's gatekeeper was Rupert was returned as fairly clear the other place wouldn't want the blighter.
One has to wonder which of the undead claims his carcass the zombies or vampires?
Sounds like a dogmatic neophobe conservative Rupert Murdoch hasn't managed to acquire technical talent that knows how to 'protect' their content.
By offering it up to bots, due to newcorps technical negligence they have chosen to use the legal system as a crude weapon because no self respecting neophyte would work for murdoch.
Although this may work today and even tomorrow I doubt it will work in 10 years, get wrecked murdoch
The letter says, "Brave scrapes News Corp websites without identifying itself and without authorization, and Brave includes the scraped copyrighted News Corp content into a search index that Brave licenses and sells to third parties via its Search API, in competition with News Corp’s own licensing and other monetization opportunities."
As the meme goes 'sounds like a personal problem'
but really
'sounds like a personal technical problem'
So your preference is that, if you don't prevent someone copying the data without permission, they should be allowed to? Does the same philosophy apply to every other thing the law says you're not supposed to do? What about if it happens to you? Whether or not I like the person the actions affected, or for that matter the person carrying them out, should not affect whether those actions are legal or not.
I've been using Brave Search for the last few years. It returns much less crap than Google Search.
They introduced the AI summaries about 9 (?) months ago. My experience has been generally favorable. It's accurate about 70% of the time, partially accurate 28% of the time, and wholly wrong 2% of the time. I tend to ask it technical questions and the responses that are incorrect are usually deprecated/outdated. It doesn't have a sense of time. Last I checked, it was using the Llama LLM.
Overall it has saved me time from clicking on a bunch of results trying to find the pertinent information. Often it helps me to re-phrase the search so I can get more accurate results. I don't have high expectations for AI and so I take its responses with a good dose of skepticism.
I don't use the Brave browser.
Didn't News Corp, along with others, 'lobby' (an near acceptable term for handing cash over) the Australian Government to make the likes of Google pay a surcharge to the media outlets for the summaries of the News pages they put in search results.
Currently (in the UK at least) you are now faced with a Pay Us Money or accept personalised adverts flash box from the MSM newspapers which means I no longer read any of their twaddle !!