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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. TeMPOraL · 1789734845 · 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. cowanon77 · 1789739565 · focus · HN ↗
    I only see 2 consistent world views: either intellectual property is real, or it is a false concept and all information should be free.
    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.
    Aurornis · 1789746263 · focus · HN ↗
    > If IP is real, then the AI companies have performed flagrant theft.
    It’s called Derivative Work and it’s a good feature for IP law: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
    You wouldn’t like a world where companies could copyright knowledge and then prevent anyone else from making a derivative of that knowledge.
    Imagine Wikipedia being taken down for sharing knowledge that another company wrote about first. It’s a bad idea.
    EagnaIonat · 1789746811 · focus · HN ↗
    > It’s called Derivative Work
    That would be on what the AI model generates, not what it is trained on.
    The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument. So much so that some companies are not using stolen information to build their models.
    IBM for example indemnifies its models for its customers and has detailed information on where the sources came from to train them.
    Aurornis · 1789747664 · focus · HN ↗
    > The latter is where the contention is, and it's a valid argument
    It has been tried in court several ways already. Remember the lawsuit that forced Anthropic to use physical books? They tried to argue that the books couldn’t be trained on at all. It failed.
    porkshoe · 1789749433 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. That judge misunderstood badly, and made a bad ruling.

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