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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. TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
      > It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up.

      Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form. This rhetoric sounds impressive, but really looks more like "piracy is theft" line from early 2000s, similarly flawed in basic premise.

      Whether the end result threatens the form in which culture is created, at least beyond just threatening the business models of the gatekeepers, is a separate discussion, but you can't draw the heart-string-pulling "life's work got appropriated" arguments there so easily.

      And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.

      There's plenty to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but one thing it's not, is "robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up".

      1. tripzilch · · focus · HN ↗
        What do you mean, it's already robbing me of the ability to discuss techniques with a number of my peers since they decided the mediocre output of LLMs is good enough instead of understanding what they are doing.

        In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly, and discuss techniques except in spaces they can be sure it's a one-on-one with a human being.

        Some things already got lost.

        1. burningChrome · · focus · HN ↗
          >> In addition, a great number of people have decided to stop publishing their code publicly,

          A lot of my peers who have been in tech for more than a decade are all doing this. They're effectively backing out of the industry. Their attitude now is they're ready for retirement in their 40's. They're only building and working on side projects and only sharing with people they know, nobody else.

          One thing I'm seeing right now is the amount of institutional and domain knowledge being lost is a on a massive scale. The more startling fact is nobody seems to care - as if vibe coding and LLM's are going to fill this gap.

          1. rpdillon · · focus · HN ↗
            It's interesting to me that the actual motivations for releasing code open-source were very different than I had assumed for the past ~30 years. I always liked to give stuff away so folks could play with and try stuff. As far as I can tell, the only reason not to still give away code is the desire for credit, which was never all that interesting to me.

            But then again, I haven't devoted my life to developing and releasing a huge open source project used by millions, so perhaps my opinion should be discounted accordingly.

            1. TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
              No, I don't think your opinion should be discounted. It just turns out that a bulk of open-source movement had ulterior motives, and were actually in this for credit or downstream opportunities, not to actually give things away in a pay-it-forward fashion.

              The reaction to LLMs pretty clearly revealed who was giving things away, and who was indirectly selling them and using "giving away" for unfair advantage.

              1. tripzilch · · focus · HN ↗
                Wow you're really "irked" by the existence of people writing software for reasons you apparently cannot comprehend, aren't you?
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