Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
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Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
jacquesm · · focus · HN ↗
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.
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
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".
cowanon77 · · focus · HN ↗
If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.
If IP is not real, then the algorithms and weights the AI companies have developed should also be free as they are just more information.
The status quo of "your knowledge has no protection, but our knowledge is sacred" is the worst of all possible worlds.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
Instead we should try to find the most practical solution that has the most benefit - which will probably be more complex than yes/no.
zdragnar · · focus · HN ↗
That very much falls within the "IP is not real" category. Taking a utilitarian approach here is exactly what the sam altman / effective altruist crowd is doing (or claiming, at least).
Believe it or not, but there are different philosophies. The US Constitution, for example, is written under the framework that all rights are innate, and the government merely endorses, not grants, those which are described. This framework creates a moral basis to rights, such that things like property are not merely social constructs but moral goods. To violate them is itself an immoral act.
nz · · focus · HN ↗
Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice.
It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers.
zdragnar · · focus · HN ↗
There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent.
We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society.
Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence).
zdragnar · · focus · HN ↗
This is a straw man that nobody is arguing.
> Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information"
Again, nobody is arguing that "concentrating information" is bad. They're arguing that the expression of ideas in a specific format is a type of property, and that what AI companies are doing is immoral theft. Further, states and the federal government have the means and impetus to prosecute theft according to the powers given them by the Constitution. The only thing that is stopping them from doing so is that the claim that theft has occurred is contested, and the method in question has not been successfully tried in court in the broad.
joquarky · · focus · HN ↗