Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”
Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI.
It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.
They don’t care. They want all the money this quarter.
That’s not quite the thing. They know that people in various societies in the course of history could create artifacts getting much less in return than they’d get today in a market without LLMs. They just want those people to become crops in their fields, so to say. To reap and not sow.
There’s the obvious problem with this, that there still are alternative business models of closed circles and ordering artifacts, not accepting offers to buy them. And, of course, that either it’s IP violation of ultimate proportions, or if it’s not, then they are going to have too much competition to get anything out of it anyway.
So it’s either oligopoly with regulatory capture, or too much competition to make this profitable.
They apparently want to make some theft legal and some not, a bit like copyright protection entities in ex-Soviet states, which are usually controlled by former pirates legalized (with ex-pirate electronic libraries which are now legitimate stores, except I’m confident they didn’t get consent of most authors whose books are being sold, similarly with movies and such), hunting their “honest pirate” competition.
So - no, at the point this is mainstream, the only regulation of this should be aimed at enforcing existing laws against them. Then one can think of some, but before existing laws are being firmly enforced - no.
Except enforcing existing laws can mean fines bigger than their capitalization and some life sentences for all chief people involved, and these are all “too big to fail” companies, so I don’t even know.
If these companies are, figuratively, sentenced to death for doing this, then it’ll be a process of the century. It’ll define future. A bit like with Standard Oil and United Fruit Company. Or so I think.
Except it might go differently, in their favor, then it won’t be a very nice future.
Standard Oil’s monopoly wasn’t ever truly dealt with in my opinion. We’re still seeing the fallout of people who got way too rich off it. I’m sure some asshole Rockefeller has had a meeting on Venezuelan oil in the last year.
Or they will pop all by themselves?
I mean there is not very much new data to train on, and only so much refining you can do (and you don’t need to be one of the big endebted companies to do that).