Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
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".
nunez · · focus · HN ↗
I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take.
Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops.
If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges).
If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.