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".
globular-toast · · focus · HN ↗
The kind of "piracy" you're talking about wasn't depriving the authors of anything because you could always make the argument you weren't going to pay for it anyway. If, on the other hand, you were making copies and charging people for them, you could definitely say you were depriving the legitimate authors of that revenue. AI companies are very much doing the latter, not the former.
The other part of it is it's not just copying. Previously, if I decided to make a copy of a work without paying, I'm only copying the work, not the author's whole writing style. Now the AI companies are depriving authors of revenue from works they haven't even made yet.
If they were able to create a model de novo then they could truly claim it hasn't just been lifted from existing culture.