StarNow updated T&Cs

Tanzila said

Does anyone know any other sites like starnow?

Well, there's Mandy, but Starnow own them as well, and they've just made the same terms change:

https://www.mandy.com/terms-of-service/

I would guess this is similar to movie companies contracting to own actors' likenesses, which caused a lot of fuss before. Originally, I totally understood it in cases like the actor who died during the filming of The Matrix or the one who died during the filming of Fast and Furious. With movie companies owning your likeness, they can complete the movie without you, using either cut scenes or AI-generated content. However, it also allows them to add you—or should I say, your likeness—to sequels without any recompense to you, your family, or your agent. This, I guess, is a lot like that. You get ultra-famous, and they get to use or adapt your work in any way they like for advertising or to simply make money 

Unfocussed Mike it’s a shame, honestly really liked Starnow, got a lot of work through there

ANDY00 said

 You get ultra-famous, and they get to use or adapt your work in any way they like for advertising or to simply make money 

I hadn't thought about it in these terms! You are right. There are of course people who have become recognisable who are still in these databases.

I suspect, though, if it is about AI, it is much more about the aggregate picture. That is, they have say a million users, and of each of those users they have multiple photos in different outfits, different angles. They may have video, they may have audio. But as it is a casting site, each individual profile's media will be much more tightly focussed/centred on one person, which makes for much richer data for training an AI to generate arbitrary fake people. This is valuable data.

At a guess, they are expecting pushback that will narrow these terms, and this is just a blatant attempt to shift the Overton Window, but still. What a ghastly change!

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

Unfocussed Mike said

ANDY00 said

 You get ultra-famous, and they get to use or adapt your work in any way they like for advertising or to simply make money 

I hadn't thought about it in these terms! You are right. There are of course people who have become recognisable who are still in these databases.

I suspect, though, if it is about AI, it is much more about the aggregate picture. That is, they have say a million users, and of each of those users they have multiple photos in different outfits, different angles. They may have video, they may have audio. But as it is a casting site, each individual profile's media will be much more tightly focussed/centred on one person, which makes for much richer data for training an AI to generate arbitrary fake people. This is valuable data.

At a guess, they are expecting pushback that will narrow these terms, and this is just a blatant attempt to shift the Overton Window, but still. What a ghastly change!

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

The main point is that I think you will see a lot more tech firms taking ownership of the information you supply. This trend has been gradually accelerating for a long time, and in the background, many of the bigger names have monetized your information, including thought patterns, buying habits, and behaviour data. I have a very small digital footprint; I only really use this site, and although I have Instagram, it's private and I don’t have many followers. I’m glad about that because I suspect that in the next few years, people will face a lot of stress trying to remove content and information about themselves from the internet.

ANDY00 said

Unfocussed Mike said

ANDY00 said

 You get ultra-famous, and they get to use or adapt your work in any way they like for advertising or to simply make money 

I hadn't thought about it in these terms! You are right. There are of course people who have become recognisable who are still in these databases.

I suspect, though, if it is about AI, it is much more about the aggregate picture. That is, they have say a million users, and of each of those users they have multiple photos in different outfits, different angles. They may have video, they may have audio. But as it is a casting site, each individual profile's media will be much more tightly focussed/centred on one person, which makes for much richer data for training an AI to generate arbitrary fake people. This is valuable data.

At a guess, they are expecting pushback that will narrow these terms, and this is just a blatant attempt to shift the Overton Window, but still. What a ghastly change!

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

The main point is that I think you will see a lot more tech firms taking ownership of the information you supply. This trend has been gradually accelerating for a long time, and in the background, many of the bigger names have monetized your information, including thought patterns, buying habits, and behaviour data. I have a very small digital footprint; I only really use this site, and although I have Instagram, it's private and I don’t have many followers. I’m glad about that because I suspect that in the next few years, people will face a lot of stress trying to remove content and information about themselves from the internet.

Well -- monetising the user profile data is obviously how services are made viable, yeah. But selling it has usually been something they don't do. Because you can only sell it once to each data customer, and you dilute the value each time you do.

Sites have always had terms about sublicensing/performing so that they can deliver the service at all -- it's a commonplace legal boilerplate -- but they don't usually claim the right to sell it. Instagram make it clear they do not, in plain english.

The business model is to hold onto the data as a gatekeeper and make use of the unique knowledge -- and indeed to build out the site to maximise the primary value (your users' tendency to sell stuff _you_ make or resell).

You don't sell your user data if you can instead sell adverts on it. You don't sell the details of your users if you can instead sell the targeting of adverts using those details. Because that's a renewable. There are always new ads, right?

But the advertising-driven economy online is absolutely collapsing (even before AI).

So what is happening is sites who have large rich datasets are realising that selling for AI training is just too valuable, because ads are increasingly difficult or worthless, and they are either going to create their own datasets or (like DeviantArt) create tools to help AI providers scrape their data. It might be the only way some of these sites clear their debt piles.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

The model of having your own website which need not be elaborate since people coming to it are interested, and using other people's to bring them to you looks more and more sensible.

Again.

That applies to items, not to the useful chat and interactions between people which assorted services support.

Unfocussed Mike said

Allesandro B said

Unfocussed Mike whilst the website was useful. StarNow are a very strange company and their tech is absolutely dreadful. Although the casting system is still way better than here

Yeah. But it doesn't take much to imagine they've been approached by an AI firm. I doubt anyone on the internet has a cleaner, better-correlated database of photographs, audio and video of as many individual people.

I suspect it will pass people by without much fuss, as we sleepwalk to the enshittifapocalypse.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

I'd be pretty sure you are right.  As for passing without fuss you are probably right unfortunately.

MidgePhoto said

The model of having your own website which need not be elaborate since people coming to it are interested, and using other people's to bring them to you looks more and more sensible.

Again.

That applies to items, not to the useful chat and interactions between people which assorted services support.

The problem is basically that, at a first approximation, nobody visits websites anymore, except worms and spambots. 

Unfocussed Mike said

...

The problem is basically that, at a first approximation, nobody visits websites anymore, except worms and spambots. 

Just the 5.

But their business models are failing.

Unfocussed Mike said

ANDY00 said

Unfocussed Mike said

ANDY00 said

 You get ultra-famous, and they get to use or adapt your work in any way they like for advertising or to simply make money 

I hadn't thought about it in these terms! You are right. There are of course people who have become recognisable who are still in these databases.

I suspect, though, if it is about AI, it is much more about the aggregate picture. That is, they have say a million users, and of each of those users they have multiple photos in different outfits, different angles. They may have video, they may have audio. But as it is a casting site, each individual profile's media will be much more tightly focussed/centred on one person, which makes for much richer data for training an AI to generate arbitrary fake people. This is valuable data.

At a guess, they are expecting pushback that will narrow these terms, and this is just a blatant attempt to shift the Overton Window, but still. What a ghastly change!

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

The main point is that I think you will see a lot more tech firms taking ownership of the information you supply. This trend has been gradually accelerating for a long time, and in the background, many of the bigger names have monetized your information, including thought patterns, buying habits, and behaviour data. I have a very small digital footprint; I only really use this site, and although I have Instagram, it's private and I don’t have many followers. I’m glad about that because I suspect that in the next few years, people will face a lot of stress trying to remove content and information about themselves from the internet.

Well -- monetising the user profile data is obviously how services are made viable, yeah. But selling it has usually been something they don't do. Because you can only sell it once to each data customer, and you dilute the value each time you do.

Sites have always had terms about sublicensing/performing so that they can deliver the service at all -- it's a commonplace legal boilerplate -- but they don't usually claim the right to sell it. Instagram make it clear they do not, in plain english.

The business model is to hold onto the data as a gatekeeper and make use of the unique knowledge -- and indeed to build out the site to maximise the primary value (your users' tendency to sell stuff _you_ make or resell).

You don't sell your user data if you can instead sell adverts on it. You don't sell the details of your users if you can instead sell the targeting of adverts using those details. Because that's a renewable. There are always new ads, right?

But the advertising-driven economy online is absolutely collapsing (even before AI).

So what is happening is sites who have large rich datasets are realising that selling for AI training is just too valuable, because ads are increasingly difficult or worthless, and they are either going to create their own datasets or (like DeviantArt) create tools to help AI providers scrape their data. It might be the only way some of these sites clear their debt piles.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

Oh, I’m pretty sure Google and the likes have been doing it for the last decade, to be honest. I mean, search for something on Google, and the next thing you know, all the ads on YouTube, Amazon, and all your usual sites are focused on what you searched for. So, if they don’t, it’s uncannily psychic. They might say they don’t, but personally, I 100% believe they do, along with other sites like YouTube and Amazon, etc. even your phone sells your tracking info i believe which is why ads change if your on holiday.

Allesandro B said

RedBaron said

Allesandro B

Have you? When you delete an image you get a message about still remaining in a section you cannot access. I have emailed requesting this be deleted too

in the media locker, yes you can access it, right at the top on the right, its a funny icon

Thanks. done

ANDY00 said

Oh, I’m pretty sure Google and the likes have been doing it for the last decade, to be honest. I mean, search for something on Google, and the next thing you know, all the ads on YouTube, Amazon, and all your usual sites are focused on what you searched for. So, if they don’t, it’s uncannily psychic. They might say they don’t, but personally, I 100% believe they do, along with other sites like YouTube and Amazon, etc. even your phone sells your tracking info i believe which is why ads change if your on holiday.

That's not really how that works. But it is complex to explain what is going on, because it absolutely is fast.

Google operates an ad network (and also owns Youtube of course). Meta has an ad network. Amazon has an ad network. A handful of other big networks exist.

Web pages have, essentially, some real estate that they hand over to those networks. And when they do that, they communicate the page content topics to the advertising network, as well.

So whenever you search for something on Google (or Facebook), yes, they directly know what you're searching for and that informs their own networks. But if you follow a link to any site that has an advert, that advertising network now knows you're likely looking for something on that page. So those advertisement networks create pseudonymous profiles on you too.

The next time you land on a page that an ad network is running on, that network knows it could target ads to you based on other things you've been looking at, very recently.

Then you have advertisers, who all want to sell things to people who are interested in those categories.

And as you and others browse the internet there is literally a very fast, real-time bidding war going on for ad impressions that would be relevant to the interests the ad networks have connected to you. It's so fast that it happens between you loading the page and the ad being served to you. This can happen in about 100 milliseconds.

So if you look for something really niche and lucrative, yeah, you will find ads targeting you _very_ quickly.

But Google and Meta and the other networks aren't selling your details or your interests to the advertisers at all -- that would dilute the value of their data.

They are selling the fraction of the webpage you are looking at, based on what they know of your own interests. Basically, they are live-auctioning your current attention, based on what they know -- they are taking programmatic bids from advertisers and the highest bidder for your attention wins (kind of like the way eBay bids are worked out, I think).

https://www.adjust.com/glossary/real-time-bidding/

Of course if you click an ad that an advertiser has placed, that ad will link back to your profile on the advertiser's site.

As to the question of the phone targeting you different ads when you're on holiday -- again that's the ad network. They can work out at the very least which country you are in from your phone's IP net block.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

Unfocussed Mike said

ANDY00 said

Oh, I’m pretty sure Google and the likes have been doing it for the last decade, to be honest. I mean, search for something on Google, and the next thing you know, all the ads on YouTube, Amazon, and all your usual sites are focused on what you searched for. So, if they don’t, it’s uncannily psychic. They might say they don’t, but personally, I 100% believe they do, along with other sites like YouTube and Amazon, etc. even your phone sells your tracking info i believe which is why ads change if your on holiday.

That's not really how that works. But it is complex to explain what is going on, because it absolutely is fast.

Google operates an ad network (and also owns Youtube of course). Meta operates an ad network. A handful of other ad networks exist.

Web pages have, essentially, some real estate that they hand over to those networks. And when they do that, they communicate the page content topics to the advertising network, as well.

So whenever you search for something on Google (or Facebook), yes, they directly know what you're searching for and that informs their own networks. But if you follow a link to any site that has an advert, that advertising network now knows you're likely looking for something on that page. So those advertisement networks create pseudonymous profiles on you too.

The next time you land on a page that an ad network is running on, that network knows it could target ads to you based on other things you've been looking at, very recently.

Then you have advertisers, who all want to sell things to people who are interested in those categories.

And as you and others browse the internet there is literally a very fast, real-time bidding war going on for ad impressions that would be relevant to the interests the ad networks have connected to you. It's so fast that it happens between you loading the page and the ad being served to you. This can happen in about 100 milliseconds.

So if you look for something really niche and lucrative, yeah, you will find ads targeting you _very_ quickly.

But Google and Meta and the other networks aren't selling your details or your interests to the advertisers at all -- that would dilute the value of their data.

They are selling the fraction of the webpage you are looking at, based on what they know of your own interests. Basically, they are live-auctioning your current attention, based on what they know -- they are taking programmatic bids from advertisers and the highest bidder for your attention wins (kind of like the way eBay bids are worked out, I think).

https://www.adjust.com/glossary/real-time-bidding/

Of course if you click an ad that an advertiser has placed, that ad will link back to your profile on the advertiser's site.

 

Edited by Unfocussed Mike

Interesting, so how would you classify "real-time bidding" (RTB) as when companies like Google and Amazon, etc., have a clear preference for either their own sales outlets or ones that directly pay them in some way?

ANDY00 said

Interesting, so how would you classify "real-time bidding" (RTB) as when companies like Google and Amazon, etc., have a clear preference for either their own sales outlets or ones that directly pay them in some way?

To be honest I'm not sure this matters, because basically whenever you land on a page on a major site you can more or less assume all the major ad networks know about it! But I guess Amazon is advertising on the Doubleclick network (Google), and Google is probably an advertiser on Amazon's ad network. Amazon get around advertising on their own network by having their own brand products, I suspect, and through internal accounting.

Anyway we are getting very off topic here.

Edited by Unfocussed Mike