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

955 points · 841 comments · pluc

  1. jacquesm · · 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 · · 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. mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
        Culture robbery is not limited to AI. Any big concert for example is capitalismed to hell. So are neighborhoods. Where you used to have people just living, now you have an intentionally designed facade for people to live within. There was a comment on the 40C3 thread saying it's got too capitalist because of the ticket cost, and idk about that because it's always been hosted in commercial venues to my knowledge, but the vibe of the conference and the club itself are much less rebel than they used to be. Stuff like Burning Man now exists for people like Elon to go there and say "I was at Burning Man" and for people to get T-shirts saying "I was at Burning Man" and photos of themselves being at Burning Man more than for whatever the first few ones were about.
        1. loloquwowndueo · · focus · HN ↗
          The what thread, now? Got a link instead?
          1. n_plus_1_acc · · focus · HN ↗
            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49737787">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49737787
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