AI Training Is Built on Your Content. Nobody Asked Permission.
A Microsoft executive called it the largest theft of labor in human history. Here is what that means for anyone who has ever published anything online.
Let's Stay with the Theft.
Last week we looked at two AI stories that broke at the same time. One was about extinction. The other was about theft. We are sticking with the theft.
The short version: the AI Labs are using published content to train their models. Books, articles, images, music, code, and much more. Content that is protected by intellectual property and copyright law. Content that belongs to other people.
What This Looks Like for a Regular Person.
This is what happens when a regular person does it.
You read a book. You take what you learned and spin it into something new, something that makes you money. Lots of it. You do not credit the original author. You do not acknowledge that this was their idea. You simply laundered it through a different process and took the applause when the end product landed successfully.
Did you earn the results? Certainly. Was it your idea? Definitely not. Is the original creator owed something? Absolutely. If it was not your idea but you are profiting from it, what exactly separates this from plagiarism?
Try this as an individual, and you will lose your shirt, your reputation, and quite possibly your freedom. The AI Labs are doing it at industrial scale and calling it innovation.
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So as the Labs continue to thwart the law, who exactly is going to ensure the composers, the publishers, the writers, the artists, and every other kind of content creator gets their due? More importantly, who is going to bell the cat that is, by any honest measure, intellectual piracy?
This Does Concern You.
You may be thinking, well, I am not a writer, so this does not concern me.
Think again.
If you have ever created (or intend to create) any type of content that lives somewhere on the internet, the AI Labs have already found it. Or they will. They will do what needs to be done with it, and your name, your business, your LLC, or whatever represents you, will never appear anywhere in the credits at the end of this movie. And your bank account will never get so much as a whiff of the word compensation for as long as this heist continues to be treated as business as usual.
The Part that Demands Attention.
So what are we doing while this inequity thrives?
In true emperor fiddling while Rome burns fashion, we are arguing about AI slop. We are having a low-impact argument with the volume dialed to eleven while the heist continues uninterrupted in the background.
The AI Labs cannot believe their luck at this turn of events. The public is distracted by the output while few are asking hard questions about the input. The theft debate is quiet, consequential, and exactly where our attention should be.
Viral or not, trending or not, we would be well advised to keep this animal in our sights.
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