cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/52443941
Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI’s data practices “theft” while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
MS: Wait! That’s our job! That’s our fucking job!
–George Carlin
It’s just slavery with extra steps.
Remember kids, if you see someone who willingly works for a large company working on generative AI, be sure to give them their favorite salute: Sieg Heil!
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person
I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person.
Let me give you an example…
Ideas aren’t property, ass-hat.
You can’t steal publicly available information.
If what you actually mean is that ideas can’t be copyrighted, then yes, you are right.
Content, or simply works, is different: in most jurisdictions, whenever you create anything, you own its copyright whether you like it or not. In Europe, IIRC, there is not even a way of waiving that right.
The point here is that AS crawlers not only use but also reproduce information (sometimes verbatim) they don’t own the copyright for and is therefore not theirs to publish. As anyone who went to the university knows, presenting the work of others as yours is the one thing you’re not allowed to do.
What? Ideas absolutely can be property. Hence copyright and patents.
I’m pretty sure if I wrote a book called the “Adventures of Harry Potter,” I would get sued immediately.
And if a slave wanted to leave work, they could be murdered. Because at one time, we considered people could be property
There’s a difference between what is right and what is legal.
I’m pretty sure if I wrote a book called the “Adventures of Harry Potter,” I would get sued immediately.
Just call it Perry Hotter. Disrupting the female world of sorcery with his magic wand of love.
Perry Hotter with his Platypus familiar?
I mean, slavery comes to mind….
Chattel slavery is the worst evil on a very, very long scale of evils inflicted on working people. It is so evil it stands apart. But it doesn’t make all the other labor abuses unimportant.
The plantation owners buy chattel slaves if you let them. You take them away and they import indentured labour. Take that away and they want convicts. Or illegal immigrants who can’t go to the authorities. Non-union labor. Wage theft. Casual workers on commission. Self employed contractors with no labor rights. Unpaid interns.
Stealing every word written, every note played, every picture painted by every human to exist shouldn’t be a surprise. The fact that this was done in lawful democratic societies under our noses is crazy. It should be causing an outrage. People are becoming worryingly disconnected and distracted.
It’s individuals versus complex organizations and systems designed by the powerful. The blitz of complex systems is designed to disconnect and distract. Tax code, investing, politics, insurance, legal - everything is so complex to advantage the powerful with the means to maneuver and manipulate the systems. I think people are drowning to keep up in the maelstrom of things competing for attention. The disconnection and distraction is by design.
More impactful and incalculably more evil for sure but I actually don’t know if in terms of number of human lifetimes stolen it would be larger. Probably if we count secondary effects caused by the slave trade and ongoing marginalisation though (like if your life falls apart because you got attacked by slavers then the labour you would have done for yourself/your community is stolen in a sense).
Kinda silly and bizarre maths to do anyway. Chattel slavery vvv bad, slavery in general v bad, Looting and enclosing commons also bad. Rich people exploiting others is bad and they should be punished for doing what they knew was wrong.
Intellectual property is a fairly recent concept and a lot of the information stolen does not impact the deceased people who created it’s lives or older work that was mostly already compensated in the past era. This makes the impact much smaller in my opinion - not to say it’s not also very impactful. Slavery has been stealing labor for all of human history.
To go deeper - I would say stealing labor is what the powerful have always done. They found a new way to steal it, but it’s the same old playbook. We create, they take the majority of the value generated and act like they’re doing us a favor. Power is a parasitic enterprise.
I would agree with that, although until recent history many more people (as a percentage of concurrently existing people) were less under the thumb of others. Now virtually everyone has some tyrant large or small taking their labour (or as a Marxist would say surplus labour value).
microslop
