In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws.
From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI tools that tech companies say will supposedly benefit all of us. In a recent statement to legislative bodies, OpenAI claimed that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” It remains to be seen if courts will agree, but it’s not looking good for content creators. In February, a California court dismissed large portions of a case brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors.
Some of these cases may reveal ongoing negotiations, as some companies figure out how to pressure others into sharing a piece of the AI pie. Publisher Axel Springer and the social media platform Reddit, for […]
The motto of the Big Tech and AI companies is that “information wants to be free”. That is until it is theirs and they wish “proprietary” protections and sell our data to the highest bidder. The solution is straightforward: Penalize data theft and fraud – through incarceration. As Woody Guthrie wrote: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, And some with a fountain pen.” Now you are robbed via computer.
As the article states ” Such claims have been echoed more recently by corporations wanting to treat our digital content and even our biometric data as a mere exhaust that’s just there to be exploited. The Doctrine of Discovery survives today in a seamless move from cheap land to cheap labor to cheap data, a phenomenon we call “data colonialism.” The word “colonialism” is not being used metaphorically here, but to describe a very real emerging social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the continuous appropriation of human life through data. Data colonialism helps us understand today’s transformations of social life as extensions of a long historical arc of dispossession. All of human culture becomes the raw material that is fed to a commercial AI machine from which huge profits are expected. Earlier this year, Open AI began a fundraising round for $7 trillion, “more than the combined gross domestic products of the UK and France,” as the Financial Times put it.
What really matters is not so much whether generative AI’s outputs plagiarize the content of famous authors owned by powerful media groups. The real issue is a whole new model of profit-making that treats our lives in data form as its free input. This profitable data grab, of which generative AI is just an egregious example, is really part of a larger power struggle with an extensive history.”
The perversity and twisted logic of the “Doctrine of Discovery” is alive and well, sanctioned by the Supreme Court. A capitalists society which supposedly protects property rights but which allows the property of the common citizen, our choices and bio-metric data, to be stolen and sold is a capitalist society in terminal decline. At present, the only limits placed upon these rapacious corporations are the hard energy limits against which these schemes push. People have no idea how much actual energy the data centers used in the operations actually consume. The system is not sustainable.