It was obvious but wasn’t reported on until just recently that the maniacs racing to create the tool that will likely plunge billions of people into a vicious cycle of poverty and war, and that will rewrite history like never before, managed to illegally ingest everything mankind has ever produced.
And get this, because this is great, it wasn’t enough. Let me repeat that, it wasn’t enough.
Let’s recap. The New York Times reported that OpenAI illegally ingested everything they could scrape from the internet, whether it was copyrighted or not, to feed into their large language models. Then they built a tool to transcribe everything on youtube and ingested that. Google found out about it and debated how they could get their hands on that much data. They thought about paying book publishers or buying book publishers and then just decided to steal it.
They figured when they got caught, or if they got caught, it would just be cheaper to fight it in court. And they were right. Of the multiple lawsuits they are currently in they are likely to win all of them, or just pay a fine and keep the data.
They’re argument? Hey it’s just like sampling, we’re ingesting other people’s work but we’re only using it to produce new original work that is different enough from the source material. Pretty good argument except for the fact that usually when people sampled things they PAID FOR THE FUCKING SONG FIRST. Or in some cases paid royalties.
So, will they get away with this? And by get away I mean will they steal everything ever written, recorded, produced, filmed, photographed, painted, drawn, etc., etc., and make for themselves ungodly amounts of money while disrupting industries everywhere, creating massive job losses, giving maniacs the ability to rewrite history and likely drastically increasing global conflicts. Because I can tell you what they won’t be doing, they won’t be creating Star Trek The Next Generation. They won’t be creating a world where no one goes hungry or poverty is eradicated. That’s just not in their mindset. If you listen to the people creating this stuff that’s extremely obvious. For one they don’t know where it all leads. All they know is they have to get their first.
But what they do talk about sounds like this: We’ll increase GDP and global productivity in ways we could barely imagine before. For example, the convergence of driverless cars, A.I., robotics, and energy storage will create a global taxi network that will generate 30 Trillion dollars of new growth. Just one example of how much money will be made. That’s a direct quote from tech investor Cathie Wood from a TED talk titled Why AI Will Spark Exponential Economic Growth. That’s the mindset I’m talking about. No free Earl Grey Tea for you Picard, kick in some bitcoin credits buddy or go without.
So will they get away with it? For sure, 1000%, they will get away with it. Because, get this, it’s an arms race and our government has decided that if it doesn’t let these idiots win this race then China or Russia will. And while they’re kind of right, there is another path. The same one we took with nuclear weapons. And I get it, nobody trusts the government, but can you really trust Silicon Valley? They’re the new tobacco industry getting everyone hooked on likes and mindless scrolling, you can’t trust them. So as far as I’m concerned the government is our best bet, but it probably won’t happen. In fact it just won’t.
But here’s what we should do. Nationalize the technology, tomorrow, or even later today. We can do it. Then put together an international coalition to monitor its development, which is pretty easy to do because it requires massive amounts of climate destroying energy usage and data consumption. Which is pretty easy to monitor. They stole all our shit, what did they think was gonna happen? Well, nothing, that’s that they thought and they were right. But they’re not in the right, and they didn’t have the right. And taking what’s ours is actually our right, especially with what’s at stake. You know, the Earth and all.
We have a short window to shut them down. The only bright spot is they ran out of data to steal, so now they’re talking about having A.I. systems create data for other A.I. systems to ingest. And that’s the only thing slowing them down. I can’t imagine anything will go wrong from A.I systems basically eating their own excrement, but hey, exponential financial growth is surely worth the risk.
This whole thing is not inevitable, it takes will, human will, not hubris, which we have in abundance, to get us out of this situation. And we have a very limited amount of time to make that happen.