Timnit Gebru (she/her).Mar 18, 2025

"California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it’s an impossible standard that could crush small AI startups and developers while giving big tech firms even more power."

Trash take.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/californias-ab-412-bill-could-crush-startups-and-cement-big-tech-ai-monopoly

California’s A.B. 412: A Bill That Could Crush Startups and Cement A Big Tech AI Monopoly

California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it’s an impossible standard that could crush...

Electronic Frontier Foundation
Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Mar 18, 2025

Whether you're a small restaurant or not you have to ensure that you're not stealing your ingredients. So why is this any different?

What about the 1-2 person creative startups? Who is protecting their works in a society that devalues artists so much that "starving artist" is an expectation?

Show threadTimnit Gebru (she/her).Mar 18, 2025

The idea that you shouldn't be expected to know what data you're using to train your systems and that doing so is "an impossible task" is so normalized that its hard to know that this was not always the case even in the field of AI.

Data theft and scraping became completely normalized, along with the exploitation of crowdworkers, with the advent of photo sharing and other platforms and others like amazon mechanical turk.

So now NOT exploiting people and stealing data is the anomaly.

Show threadfear is not a WeltanschauungMar 18, 2025
@timnitGebru they even called it mechanical Turk ffs, the expectation of exploiting minority groups has been culturally grandfathered in since the beginning
Show threadDon Armstrong
@wouldinotcallmyselfahumanbeing @timnitGebru the underlying point (exploitation of cheap labor) is correct, but the name is based on the chess "automaton" of the same name: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
Mechanical Turk - Wikipedia

Mar 18, 2025 at 5:20pmWeb
Show threadfear is not a WeltanschauungMar 18, 2025
@dondelelcaro yep, that worked by exploiting a person with dwarfism stuffed into a box, a methodology which has been the unspoken template ever since. @timnitGebru
Show threadDon ArmstrongMar 18, 2025
@wouldinotcallmyselfahumanbeing @timnitGebru I don't believe any of the chess masters in the turk had achondroplasia; they were likely fairly flexible, though.
Show threadfear is not a WeltanschauungMar 18, 2025
@dondelelcaro point taken, but i'm fairly comforable with my assumption that the tech-frat-bro-industrial complex never followed any further with the metaphor than "it's a scam based on hidden labour" @timnitGebru