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. Luker88 · 1789729123 · focus · HN ↗
    > and they would definitely not give it back for free.
    ...not like they are doing it for free now either.
    open-weight is an economic war strategy of trying to undermine your competitors and prevent it from rising prices, thus preventing profit, driving them out of business.
    > I put "stolen" in quotation marks because it's still unclear if we can call that stealing
    It never was stealing: you can't steal a book by copying it. You can however commit copyright infringement.
    This blatant disregard of licenses and copyright is clearly infringing on the authors ability to make a profit from their work, which was the whole point of copyright.
    They knew it too, which is why they said nothing about the pirating and infringing until they got too big to fail.
    So now we are left discussing and wasting time on what technically counts as infringing, pirating, stealing and whatnot.
    All the while the small authors who can't possibly lawyer up against the literal biggest corporations on earth will just have to shut up.
    Yet, somehow they had deals with Disney and other big names, proving that they did actually feel they need approval.
    Their actions are two-faced, thus proving malice. Now we can go back to pointless technicalities.

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