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.
I honestly don’t see a point where we can move past this without Sam altman, nadell, musk, etc all facing mandatory life time sentence without parole, work release etc.
I would also accept the removal of their heads.
I’d prefer if they were forced to pay royalties for all the work they stole to the people they stole it from. And, like, have someone actually force them to comply. They’d have to hire a Microsoft-sized compliance department just to figure this shit out and track payments.
What seriously worries me about these companies is the fact they somehow act like what ChatGPR is doing is 100% out of their control. Dude, you built the LLM, you trained it on stolen data.
Stop acting like “oh evil LLM is built on theft and is hacking all these companies and will doom us all, whatever will we doooo?!” when it was your damn company that started this whole crap and you’re always blabbering about general AI and how this time it will definitely arrive by 2029 if they give you another 10 billion dollars. I can’t with these clowns. Remember when Musk had us believe he wanted to save the world and came from poverty? Yeah, good times
weird how Chinese AI firms aren’t saying this - but then, they don’t have a massive fiscal crunch where they have to take delivery of trillions of dollars worth of contracted compute, that they haven’t yet found a market for . . . .
https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were trying to angle for a bailout!
Gonna get real weird soon when they run out of rich new training data and they begin to consume their own shit. When that happens their entire model will collapse and if the bubble hasn’t popped already that may be what causes it.
“I am sitting in a room”
The best succinct description of llm that I’ve read was “plagiarism machine”, because that’s basically what they are: automated plagiarism. At best they create a collage of other works, at worst they copy one work verbatim, but they never create something original because they can’t.
Copying something is a lot easier and thus cheaper than creating an original work from scratch, so genuine creators cannot hope to compete on cost. Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.
Short term that’s great for the neoliberal company executives: fire the expensive artists, create cheap slop with the plagiarism machine, and thus maximize profits now. That the plagiarism machine becomes stagnant because not enough new original works are being created is a future problem, by which time the current executives will have already jumped ship.
But while it’s great for the neoliberal business model, for the rest of society it will suck. So now that we have confirmation that the AI executives know how bad their products are, and that they were just publicly lying about it in the style of tobacco executives, will anything be done about this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Personally I doubt it, there’s too much regulatory capture.
