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.
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.
The worst thing I think is that for so long we were told that working people could escape poverty and gain some control of their lives through education. Not much you could do for yourself working in a mine or factory but if your kids focus at school they can go to college and get a career. Don’t have to struggle like their parents. Buy a nice house. Raise a family. And the rug has been pulled out. The house isn’t happening. The family is on hold. Nobody is worried that AI has copied fine arts and literature from dead people. The problem is the impact on the living. It is another betrayal.
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).
I’m not really interested in ranking stuff, there are just a lot of people now is all.
The taking of the information as training data does not in itself harm people it is true, however the regurgitation of this at a scale to overwhelm human endevour does.
For example stackexchange is dead. Because who is interested in asking questions and getting slop, and who is interested in competing with slop answers produced at multiple times the speed. This resource, previously maintained by a community of volunteers to mentor people in their craft.
The fruit of this commons is now a resource you need to pay for, or will very shortly. This is just one paltry example. The commons of the internet is being enclosed and if the project is successful then it will have a similarly deleterious effect in human online freedom and craft as the enclosing of the physical commons did.