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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. CJefferson · · 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.

        1. xienze · · 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."

          1. QuantumNomad_ · · 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?

          2. CJefferson · · 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.

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