Generative AI models have been taking over the internet in recent months. This specific type of artificial intelligence helps with the creation of various content types, including data, audio, videos, and images.
Generative AI Models Are Data-Hungry
Generative AI models use various AI algorithms for content representation and processing. For instance, to come up with text, several techniques for natural language processing convert raw characters into speech parts, sentences, actions, and entities. These get represented through various techniques for encoding.
In the same way, images are also converted into different visual elements that are also represented as vectors.
However, for these models to actually work, they need to be fed with great amounts of data. The more data they have, the better their generations become.
The internet offers huge data amounts that are quite easy to capitalize on via APIs and web scraping tools. However, this data gathering process is incapable of delineating personal data or copyrighted works. As the boom in AI goes on, it has been getting clearer that the data it collects is taken from sources that are copyrighted, but at the same time, it is not just people with publications that should worry about their data being collected.
While people are mostly unaware of it, an AI company could be gathering data and using it to fuel a technology that one had no idea about.
However, there are certain places on the internet that are more difficult to access compared to others. Generally, anything that can be easily viewed through the search engine gets easily vacuumed. However, certain content, such as those behind a login page, is harder to access.
Open data across the web covers various things including photos, databases for voter registration, business sites, government pages, and news outlets. This data can be used by generative AI to train themselves to become better and to come up with results.
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How Generative AI Models Collect Data
According to Lauren Leffer, a tech reporting fellow from Scientific American, AI companies collect data primarily through automated programs known as web scrapers or web crawlers. This technology has been used to create search engines.
Web crawlers can be likened to digital spiders that move like silk strands from one URL to another. They catalog the location of all the things it encounters. Web scrapers, on the other hand, are the ones that enter and save all the information that is cataloged.
The internet is filled with several open access web crawlers. Open AI, for one, used Common Crawl to gather training data for one or more iterations for the language model of ChatGPT. As a whole, these web crawlers are part of a massive process of data gathering.
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