Mastodawn

Hercule Parrot May 11, 2023

"(W)hat we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves

The Guardian

cobalt going beige today May 10, 2023

@dangillmor maybe our future will include the necessary return of oral histories and passing on knowledge directly one to one in training and teaching.

Brooke Binkowski May 10, 2023

@dangillmor @cobalt That never stopped, but tech companies sure tried their damnedest to wrestle our stories away from us.

Daniel Schildt May 10, 2023

@brooklynmarie @dangillmor @cobalt So many people believed the promises of "easily stored" digital contents. But all those CD & DVD discs etc. are largely failing after a decade, and the old "backups" of human creativity are disappearing in the process. Just to keep the existing digital output would require a lot more than what most have possibilities for, so that history keeps disappearing. Even more on the web where anything can change overnight.

Brooke Binkowski May 10, 2023

@cobalt @dangillmor @autiomaa Yeah. It's really heartbreaking. Honestly, it scares the shit out of me how much we've already lost, and how much more we're going to lose. I'm trying to write everything down that I can.

Daniel Schildt May 10, 2023

@brooklynmarie The most heartbreaking post recently was someone going over his father's garage after parent had passed. There were countless piles of CDs that were carefully labelled and organized. But all of those were practically destroyed by the time, as the foil on top of CDs had disintegrated from the plastic. All those science experiments he had carefully documented while developing prototypes of real lasers etc. industrial measurement equipment.

Louis Ingenthron May 10, 2023

@cobalt @dangillmor Or you could just use Wikipedia or host whatever information you want on your own site.

People pretend like these companies hold some magical power, but the only power they truly have is that people choose to use their services, and that can always change.

clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛May 11, 2023

@LouisIngenthron The power asymmetry doesn't go away because you self-host, they can scrape your site too.

@dangillmor @cobalt

Louis Ingenthron May 11, 2023

@clacke @dangillmor @cobalt Hate to tell you this, but so can anyone who hears your verbal story. There's no DRM around a campfire.

Tom Ritchford May 14, 2023

@LouisIngenthron @clacke @dangillmor @cobalt To be accurate, your analogy would have to have a slave owned from birth to death by a King, sitting at every campfire, and giving back nothing to any community.

Really, to compare an individual listening to another individual around a campfire to a huge machine sucking in billions of documents is just a false comparison entirely.

Louis Ingenthron May 14, 2023

@TomSwirly If you read up, you may notice it's not a comparison I initiated.

Moreover, you seem to have missed the point. It's not the listening at issue, but the reproduction. Oral historians plied their trade by listening *and then repeating* the stories of others, often for profit.

Tom Ritchford May 15, 2023

@LouisIngenthron People listened to other people, one at a time, for their personal advancement.

This has little relevance to an owned machine sucking up all of human knowledge for the benefit of a large company.

Mack Reed May 10, 2023

@dangillmor This is a perfect distillation of the existential threat posed today, right now, not in some sci-fi, Skynet future, by unregulated AI and the capitalists brainlessly championing it. Thanks for sharing it here.

chavan May 10, 2023

“AI art generators are trained on...millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history."

"Why should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the [work] of living artists into a program..so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?" #generativeAI

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves

The Guardian

183231bcb May 10, 2023

@chavan So would you be okay with Disney training an AI on copyrighted images that Disney owns the rights to, or is it only a problem when new media companies do it?

You could not plausibly claim it was a "copyright infringement" for Disney to train an AI on images they own, yet it won't make a difference to the people who lose their jobs whether they are replaced by an open source AI made by a tiny startup or a proprietary AI owned by Disney.

@183231bcb @chavan Of course, it would be fine. Also, of course, the output from that dataset would be less valuable and interesting, which is why these AI models are being trained on much larger and diverse sets of data.

IAG May 11, 2023

@183231bcb It's definitely legal. They own the work, so they can do what they want with it. Unless they DON'T own the work, it's a legal white area.
Morally, however, it's fairly black.

Steffen Christensen May 11, 2023

@183231bcb @chavan Presumably the author would be fine with permissive AIs taught only on public domain content as well as content that is in the open source. There are such AIs, like StarCoder, that perform well. https://twitter.com/BigCodeProject/status/1654174941976068119

BigCode on Twitter

“Introducing: 💫StarCoder StarCoder is a 15B LLM for code with 8k context and trained only on permissive data in 80+ programming languages. It can be prompted to reach 40% pass@1 on HumanEval and act as a Tech Assistant. Try it here: https://t.co/4XJ0tn4K1m Release thread🧵”

Twitter

183231bcb May 11, 2023

@Wikisteff @chavan Yep, which shows the author isn't really concerned with people losing their jobs and being replaced by AI: just with whether the robots enrich traditional publishers.

For a person who loses their job to an AI, it doesn't make a difference whether they AI was trained on public domain text or whether it was trained on copyrighted text, because you've lost your job either way. But copyright expansionists only pretend to care about the person in one of those cases.

Steffen Christensen May 11, 2023

@183231bcb @chavan Rentiers gonna seek rents.

Aviva Gary May 10, 2023

@dangillmor There is an episode of ST: NG where a planet makes the best defensive system ever and once turned on can't be defeated...

I wonder how much money lust the corporations will suffer before they poison the well... 🤑

Jerry D. Harris 🦕👣May 14, 2023

@Aviva_Gary @dangillmor Also in "Star Trek: Insurrection," the Ba'ku intentionally eschewed technology that took away from their personal enrichment and experience, recognizing instead the value that their personal abilities brought to the table. Would that we had much more of that ethic in society...but, of course, CAPITALISM... 😓

Aviva Gary May 15, 2023

@dinogami @dangillmor truth

@dangillmor Exactly.

Kevin Russell May 10, 2023

\thanks Dan

We should be used to incisive insight and analysis coming from Naomi Klein.

But this well crafted monkey wrench is welcome indeed.

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are\

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are

Tech CEOs want us to believe that generative AI will benefit humanity. They are kidding themselves

The Guardian

synlogic May 10, 2023

@dangillmor or compensating them

&y May 10, 2023

@dangillmor I take comfort in knowing with absolute certainty that any “artificial intelligence” they create with the scraped data will be cringy garbage that nobody is interested in. And they’ll move on to the next shiny thing as soon as their herd decides what the next shiny thing is.

Ruxbat! 🍉🦇May 10, 2023

@dangillmor @ian “AI” is stolen labor, end of

The Hobnobbin' Gobblin May 10, 2023

@dangillmor this is the clearest breakdown on AI I have come across. It is unbelievably distopian that these algorithms are swallowing up the sum total of accrued human knowledge and creation. If the history of unbridled capitalism is any indication, this likely doesn't benefit anyone but a select few.

Joseph Muller May 10, 2023

@dangillmor 🔥🔥🔥

SmashedRatOnPress May 10, 2023

@dangillmor Sitting here waiting for a tsunami of lawsuits about all of this appropriation...

Old Man Mike May 10, 2023

@dangillmor and there’s fuck all we can do about it

mj May 10, 2023

It does seem worse now that it's just a handful of companies using novel tech to isolate & gatekeep the work of others, instead of handfuls of industries and/or nations.

Things that are hidden in plain sight can be revealed by slowly removing the 'noise' over time, until there's nothing to hide behind.

Tools of #oppression will ultimately be used to destroy oppressors.

#network #organization #Autopoietic_Reconfiguration

Sabrina May 10, 2023

@dangillmor I hear it all the time: just use ai to write social media post. But when you proofread them you can clearly see that yoh still need someone that does some edits. It can help us for sure but we shouldn’t rely only on ai!

Anarchy How May 10, 2023

@dangillmor the enclosure of the intellectual commons

(((Jann Gobble)))🏳️‍🌈May 10, 2023

@dangillmor You can remove Apple from this. They did not announce ANY AI product that does what you say.

Steve Yelvington May 10, 2023

@dangillmor
I find the language "seizing ... And walling it off" not just hyperbolic but inappropriate. Reading a book does not keep others from reading it.

Hercule Parrot May 11, 2023

@dangillmor
Who owns information after it has been massaged by GPT is going to be a battle.

Jeff Moe May 11, 2023

If they can do this, I can train an AI using Disney and Hollywood models for making AI digital content, right? Right?

Somehow, I think they will be able to mine any content they want, yet if we build models using *their* content, we'll get the Bearcat.

🇳🇿May 11, 2023

@dangillmor yup the 'wealthiest companies" - with the least ethical oversight possible (i.e. none)... Corporations at that scale need to be taken apart and sold for scrap. They're bigger than most countries' economies, and they're amoral autocracies with strong psychopathic tendencies.

But then Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon may soon be history themselves as they are betting all their assets on a doomed version of so called “AI” that is killing their own business model.

IAG May 11, 2023

@dangillmor Correction for the article. Tech CEOs aren't kidding themselves: they know full well that generative AI is mostly BS and are trying to fool everyone else.

Liz Ellis She/Her🌳May 11, 2023

@dangillmor I'm so tired this morning that I thought this was about the Elsiver scam

Marvin May 11, 2023

Lol the author is hysterically simping for big corporations and the corrupt institutions that enable them. Just the old fashioned ones instead of the newfangled ones that are eating their lunch.

Steffen Christensen May 11, 2023

@dangillmor Information is a non-rival good. This is only true where no other actor can train large language models on content. That is not this world.

Further, the demand elasticity of information is not zero, so it is in no way clear, obvious, or predestined that AI will displace human effort in the creative arts.

Naman May 11, 2023

@dangillmor @rauschma I just want to add the fact that Apple has no Generative AI project that anyone knows about and no evidence that they’re using non-open-domain content from the web.

La Robotica May 12, 2023

@dangillmor the most lucid statement I have seen on our reality.

CelloMom On Cars May 12, 2023

Put that way, this sounds a lot like a digital version of Enclosure, in which the commons was enclosed by rich landowners and the common people kept out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Act_1773

Despite the pre-existing Charter of the Forest, which guaranteed common people a means of livelihood on the commons.

Inclosure Act 1773 - Wikipedia

Bhante Subharo ☸May 12, 2023

Dear Naomi Klein,

Thank you for totally throwing it down there in your essay: "AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are".

That was awesome.

Jen Mc 🏳️‍🌈🇦🇺May 14, 2023

@dangillmor @kcarruthers

That was a really informative read. Thank you so much for sharing.

baba montana May 14, 2023

@dangillmor Don't worry about the large corporations. When you see what millions of individuals end up doing you will see the world turned upside down.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither

Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"

Leaked Internal Google Document Claims Open Source AI Will Outcompete Google and OpenAI

SemiAnalysis

Felicity Martin May 14, 2023

@dangillmor ⬆️
“.…our current system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to maximize the extraction of wealth and profit – from both humans and the natural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as capitalism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-concentrated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hallucinations – is much more likely to become a fearsome tool of further dispossession and despoilation.”

Felicity Martin May 14, 2023

@dangillmor
⬆️ The next stage of capitalism. First they privatised the land, food production and housing, then water, now carbon in the soil and plant life, even genetic codes. Human knowledge is the next step. Digitisation enables them to capture and profit from others’ labour.

Rich Stein (he/him)May 15, 2023

@dangillmor It's not #AI "hallucinating." It's Tech CEOs, et al. gaslighting.

tqwhite May 16, 2023

@dangillmor @drfreeride

Bunk. There are tons of open source LLMs. There are tons of smart people making new ones. Rembrandt gave a lifetime of labor to train a zillion artists making money off of his innovations. ‘Intellectual Property’ has encouraged greed and stinginess that will kill our culture long before AI does.