Thread

Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

955 points · 841 comments · pluc

jacquesm · 1789726316 · focus · HN ↗
It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.
It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.
1. pingou · 1789726907 · focus · HN ↗
  >It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up
  Would regulation help with that? Right now you can download free models that have been trained on that "stolen" data.
  With regulation and compensation, only rich companies would be able to do that, and they would definitely not give it back for free. I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing. Nobody would say a human reading a book and learning from it is stealing. I'm not saying that a machine doing the same is equivalent, but the only thing I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".
  1. CJefferson · 1789727885 · focus · HN ↗
    We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
    Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves. I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
    hlynurd · 1789727961 · focus · HN ↗
    >companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves
    really not the same entities here
    CJefferson · 1789728363 · focus · HN ↗
    No, but why should we accept they get away with it? Also Microsoft has definitely sued people for pirating windows and now collaborates with OpenAI and uses their ai trained on stolen materials.
    hlynurd · 1789728676 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah that's more fair
    cgio · 1789728443 · focus · HN ↗
    Not at leaf level, but if you trace the trunk, pretty sure you end up on the same one.
    ipython · 1789729357 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)
    <a href="https://www.napster.com/blog/napster-heads-to-microsoft-build-with-omniagent-api" rel="nofollow">https://www.napster.com/blog/napster-heads-to-microsoft-buil...
    torginus · 1789731132 · focus · HN ↗
    Morally speaking, one of the issues of modern society is the idea that knowledge should be free which was partially started by the file sharing movement, which didn't really move society in the right direction imo.
    Free means the same as worthless, which inherently isn't true - since information takes time to consume in some form, and your time isn't worthless. Therefore even if you could listen to all songs theoretically for free, you would need to spend an inordinate time doing that.
    When I was a kid, getting a CD from your favourite band was a major expense, getting a video game even more so. But it formed a sort of emotional attachment (and not even just for me), my friends talked about how 'band X''s new album was amazing or a stinker. Since there were multiple bands making similar kinds of music, choosing to be a fan of one but not the other carried real monetary weight.
    Nowadays you just fish out a song you think you would like out of the endless sea of Spotify, no different from prompting an LLM. No, Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
    Same applies for Steam & videogames.
    Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it. I'm sure most musicians would trade a million fans who might check them out if they're in town, to ones who think their music changed their perspective in life.
    Also the process of creating a song that vaguely appeals to millions is different from making one that speaks to a thousand.
    This is a fundamental issue of modern capitalistic society, similar to the Marxist idea of 'alienation' - once something is cheap to get, you don't appreciate the effort that went into making it. And if your customers don't care about the thing they get, producers won't make an effor to make it good either.
    And once nobody cares, people even forget what a quality product is like.
    TheOtherHobbes · 1789732970 · focus · HN ↗
    Interesting argument. At first sight it looks like an argument for scarcity, but I think it's more an argument for relationship - the value of art isn't in the capitalist concept of 'a for-profit content object in a corporate inventory' but in the social relationships and shared experiences it creates.
    Without that, everything gets atomised into lonely individualism. You sit there with your headphones on listening to [Interesting band]. Not only do you not really care because you don't feel personally connected to the music - it's one of literally more than a hundred million content items on Spotify - but you're not sharing the experience.
    This seems like the loss of a valuable thing which capitalist economics can't put a price on because it has no concept of value-created-by-shared-experience.
    Superficially it's the same as 'sell-content-consumption-item-to-the-mass-market' but it's fundamentally not the same kind of thing.
    johnsea · 1789733096 · focus · HN ↗
    > Nowadays you just fish out a song ... Spotify didn't make me enjoy music more.
    Maybe change your perspective? Treat Spotify like a valuable audio lexicon. You read about an artist, a song, a time and immediately you can hear what is it about. Incredible!
    If Spotify is only treated as a lazy background feelgood provider (while reading Marx;)), no wonder you feel that way. But it's your power/choice to appreciate it (or not), regardless of money.
    autoexec · 1789754532 · focus · HN ↗
    > Therefore I think the ritualistic act of paying money to get access to something does have a purpose. It inherently establishes the value of information to you, makes it an investment that you need to recoup by using it.
    The same can be said for time. You said yourself it was an investment. There's no need for money to be involved since how much time you spend on a thing will establish the value of that information to you. If you must have a ritualistic act to form a connection to music, let it be the act of listening instead of paying.
    hkt · 1789728773 · focus · HN ↗
    > We don’t have to treat people reading books and companies stealing all human knowledge the same.
    We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.
    (Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)
    ImHereToVote · 1789729503 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean if you cite a copyrighted book verbatim. You are held liable. So should a company producing copyrighted work.
    For instance a image/video generating model.
    stego-tech · 1789729741 · focus · HN ↗
    Came here to post this, got beaten by someone putting it far more succinctly than I would have.
    philipallstar · 1789729783 · focus · HN ↗
    > companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever
    One's world cannot be so drawn in crayon that "companies" is a useful level of detail with something like that. There's no irony in two totally different companies (one of which was actually an industry body, the RIAA) doing two totally different things.
    card_zero · 1789730251 · focus · HN ↗
    However, there is irony in a subscription to pirated material.
    dbspin · 1789730816 · focus · HN ↗
    Does ones world view get upgraded to oil paint if one acknowledges that it's the same class of people - and in many cases literally the same people, PE firms and family offices - profiting from 2000s era record industry profits and on the hook for / in line to profit from Open AI, Anthropic and the rest if they IPO?
    philipallstar · 1789733959 · focus · HN ↗
    No, for obvious reasons. "acknowledging" implies it's a self-evident truth that people are just refusing to see as such, when it just isn't. Completely different companies - in fact one is the Recording Industry Association of America, an industry body that exists to protect the IP of artists for the mutual benefit of artists and publishers.
    While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.
    TeMPOraL · 1789735138 · focus · HN ↗
    Moreover, it's the people/companies from RIAA and adjacent circles (news publishing) that are stoking the "AI training is theft" arguments that people here are so breathlessly repeating - in a twist of irony, it's the people that suddenly decided to align themselves with media/news conglomerates.
    dbspin · 1789748834 · focus · HN ↗
    > an industry body that exists to protect the IP of artists for the mutual benefit of artists and publishers.
    This is the most unintentionally hilarious misunderstanding of what the RIAA does, and the power relationship between artists and publishers I've read in years. In practice the RIAA exists to maintain the copyright monopoly of a few major labels. Rent seeking from the non-artist owned catalogues of the enormous majority of musicians who never 'recoup' their initial record deal.
    > While it's seductive to carve the world up into goodies and baddies, it doesn't make it true.
    It's far more seductive (since it's the default) to assume class relations don't exist, and wealth distribution is meritocratic. There may not be 'goodies and baddies', but there absolutely are rentiers and workers, billionaires and plebs.
    All the major labels are public companies. Which means it's the very same people - the investment class, who claim ownership and extract wealth from say Warner and Open AI (should it make any money - obviously the whole house of cards could come down first).
    xienze · 1789730943 · focus · HN ↗
    > Also, companies spent a long time telling us downloading single songs via Napster was the worst thing ever, before torrenting every book in existence themselves.
    So whose viewpoint is right here? Is downloading theft or not? These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
    QuantumNomad_ · 1789731643 · focus · HN ↗
    > These arguments always boil down to "it's fine when I do it, but wrong when a company does."
    The problem is that it is enforced exactly the opposite. People have been hit with fines and jail time for pirating and seeding, without even doing so for commercial gain. But when massive tech companies pirate training data for their AI and build a product from that that, nobody goes to jail. Where is the sense in that?
    CJefferson · 1789743828 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm 100% happy with either viewpoint.
    1) AI companies all get sued out of existence.
    2) AI companies can train networks, those networks don't fall under copyright, so anyone can use them for anything they want without paying.
    px43 · 1789731299 · focus · HN ↗
    > I don’t believe any of these companies have paid for all the books they have trained on.
    Did you miss the "book burning" hysteria from a couple weeks ago? These companies have been trying to digitize copyrighted materials legally, in which copyright law demands destruction of the original, and people shit on them even harder.
    It's clearly not a problem for these companies to buy the books they need for training, and they have been doing that in crazy high volumes. Lots of good training materials simply cannot be legally purchased though, and should those parts of human knowledge just be ignored?
    CJefferson · 1789743955 · focus · HN ↗
    I mean, I don't seem to get to say, "Oh I want this but I can't buy it so I'll just steal it LOL", so why should AI companies?
    victorbjorklund · 1789731977 · focus · HN ↗
    Napster was a company. Pretty sure that company didn’t tell you that.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.