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".
nickjj · · focus · HN ↗
It hasn't been literally stolen but indirectly it has been.
I spent 20 years working as a freelancer and 10 years selling tech video courses. I made enough to have a happy life (not a lot but enough to survive), as long as the income kept flowing every month.
Nowadays I make nothing from a business I've built up for 2 decades because AI took away most traffic to my site which was the entry point to my business. I actually lose money because course sales have been impacted so heavily that I pay more for hosting than I get in sales.
AI is consuming an unimaginable amount of searches which is the gateway for so many businesses. It's preventing people from being discovered on the internet. Not only that but it's taking everyone's content and selling it back to users while keeping all of the profits.
nz · · focus · HN ↗
It is unclear to me just what percentage of tech-companies, are in the business of adding extra steps to an illegal process, of turning signal into noise. For example, the vapes made by Juul are a kind of hack around public health laws. The Amazon marketplace shields merchants who sell counterfeit goods. Uber and Lyft bypassed the local laws that applied to taxi services and the medallion system. Airbnb did something similar with the laws governing hotels, and delineating who owns and who rents.
It is a special kind of disappointment, to be someone who loves technology, and to have to work in the technology industry -- because it appears to be run by people who hate everything that is not money.