cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/52443941
Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI’s data practices “theft” while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
More impactful and incalculably more evil for sure but I actually don’t know if in terms of number of human lifetimes stolen it would be larger. Probably if we count secondary effects caused by the slave trade and ongoing marginalisation though (like if your life falls apart because you got attacked by slavers then the labour you would have done for yourself/your community is stolen in a sense).
Kinda silly and bizarre maths to do anyway. Chattel slavery vvv bad, slavery in general v bad, Looting and enclosing commons also bad. Rich people exploiting others is bad and they should be punished for doing what they knew was wrong.
Intellectual property is a fairly recent concept and a lot of the information stolen does not impact the deceased people who created it’s lives or older work that was mostly already compensated in the past era. This makes the impact much smaller in my opinion - not to say it’s not also very impactful. Slavery has been stealing labor for all of human history.
To go deeper - I would say stealing labor is what the powerful have always done. They found a new way to steal it, but it’s the same old playbook. We create, they take the majority of the value generated and act like they’re doing us a favor. Power is a parasitic enterprise.
I would agree with that, although until recent history many more people (as a percentage of concurrently existing people) were less under the thumb of others. Now virtually everyone has some tyrant large or small taking their labour (or as a Marxist would say surplus labour value).
I’m not really interested in ranking stuff, there are just a lot of people now is all.
The taking of the information as training data does not in itself harm people it is true, however the regurgitation of this at a scale to overwhelm human endevour does.
For example stackexchange is dead. Because who is interested in asking questions and getting slop, and who is interested in competing with slop answers produced at multiple times the speed. This resource, previously maintained by a community of volunteers to mentor people in their craft.
The fruit of this commons is now a resource you need to pay for, or will very shortly. This is just one paltry example. The commons of the internet is being enclosed and if the project is successful then it will have a similarly deleterious effect in human online freedom and craft as the enclosing of the physical commons did.