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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. kshri24 · · focus · HN ↗
        > 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 think I am sure of is that I am not sure we can call it "stealing".

        It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it. The machine DID NOT pay for the book, DID NOT compensate the author and still learnt from it anyways.

        We need to define machine in terms of "human-power"... much the same as how we already define automobiles via "horse-power". A single NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 chip, for example, delivers roughly 35.58 teraflops of standard computing power (via 10,496 CUDA cores). That means 35.58 trillion calculations every second. In comparison, a mathematically trained human being, taking their time to solve a complex, multi-digit decimal division problem by hand takes roughly 100 to 120 seconds. That gives the human 0.01 flops. To match RTX 3090, you would need 3.56 quadrillion people working/learning in perfect sync. We can use a calculation similar to this to derive metrics on how much is being stolen for "learning/training" these models. The loot can be quantified.

        EDIT: The reason I am comparing chip computation to human-power is because the authors of those digital works intended their works to only be read by humans. Not by some alien species (even if it be made of silicon) that incorporated their work into producing models.

        So naturally the price should be determined based on this new species capabilities. I would not sell my software license for the same price to an Enterprise the size of Google that I would sell to a fellow developer. I price my product appropriately. With this entry of a new alien specie authors would need to have different tiers for them. Since these chips can train on petabytes of data and create models in a matter of days/weeks/months, it is obviously not comparable to a human being who has the capacity to ingest maybe 1-5 books a month at most. So the payout has to be different too.

        1. b3lvedere · · focus · HN ↗
          "It is stealing. A human paid for the book, compensated the author and learnt from it."

          I went to the library. Didn't pay a cent.

          Now what?

          1. kshri24 · · focus · HN ↗
            Library paid the authors.

            > Didn't pay a cent.

            Taxpayers did pay on your behalf.

            Nothing is free. Except ofcourse stealing, which is free.

            1. b3lvedere · · focus · HN ↗
              Sunshine, air, wind, gravity, radioactivity, public domain, knowledge passed on
              1. kshri24 · · focus · HN ↗
                I would not classify sunshine and air as "free". Sunshine requires the Sun to undergo continuous fusion. It is invaluable as opposed to "free". Air is invaluable asset too. Without both we would be dead. The price of both is literally price of my being alive every second of my existence.

                Public domain on the other hand is legally only possible if/when copyright has expired. That means the owner has enjoyed proceeds from copyright protection for more than his own lifetime. That is fair. It is still not comparable.

                EDIT: since you tacked on more like "wind, gravity, radioactivity" etc, I would still not classify them as "free". They are invaluable to very existence of life.

                "Knowledge passed on" is also after someone (in ancestry) has paid for it through blood, sweat and tears. It isn't "free". "Public domain" is legally recognized form of "knowledge passed on".

                1. b3lvedere · · focus · HN ↗
                  They all have “some price”, because of universal laws, but i doubt you would be friends with a corporate entity claiming the ip of them.
                  1. kshri24 · · focus · HN ↗
                    > but i doubt you would be friends with a corporate entity claiming the ip of them.

                    They can't claim. That's the point. They are an invaluable resource precisely because they cannot be OWNED by anyone. They are not FREE.

                    Hence why even corporate entities that deal with solar, wind etc talking about "HARNESSING" energy. They don't talk about OWNERSHIP of energy.

                    1. b3lvedere · · focus · HN ↗
                      Point taken. Thank you.
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