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.
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!
I was there when the internet started, and it was always doomed from the beginning. This was never going to last as a free, open resource.
and nothing changed.
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.
Yeah, but with which money? All those AI companies are not and will never be profitable (and they’ll be the reason for the next stock market bubble pop)
Which is exactly why they are pivoting to “AI sucks, LLMs are dangerous…”
Better yet, seize their assets and make them try to make a go at it as a regular person.
Seize their assets and use that to pay creators whose works they stole.
this is the way.
I like how you think outside of the box.
Could you imagine Elon Musk running a fryer or injection mold for 8 hours? Who am I kidding? he’d never pass the piss test required to run the injection mold.
I’m sure many of them think they would just prove us wrong, and because they are so smart that they would just rebuild from the ground up on their own.
My concern is they could convince another rich person of this, and get them to invest in their newest scam.
There’d have to be some sort of stipulation that made it so nobody could do that. I don’t know how you’d do that, but it could probably be done. Are there any laws that prevent people convicted of fraud from doing the same thing again? Maybe something like that.
I would love to see them roofing houses or working in a foundry. Hell, even seeing them trying to be a janitor or something.
They could still grift their way to a life of comfort through book deals with Ayn Rand or something
I doubt it. Nobody who cares about what they’d have to say actually reads books, and they wouldn’t be able to afford a ghost writer anyway.
NGL, I was kinda hoping something would destroy the internet and we could move to Reticulum/NomadNet/I2P/Tor
Shit’s been going downhill since 1999
Setting up a Reticulum node this week.
And wondering if there’s a matrix client that can use it, or if that’s something that needs to be made . . .
it was, but 2001 really picked up the pace.
The transport layer isn’t the issue.
Transport isn’t the issue, but both those protocols provide low-bandwidth hosting requirements. NomadNet is straight out of the 90’s bbs territory, and I2P is slow enough on its own to preclude anything too fancy. It’s forcing us to go back to the small distributed hosting models, which I consider a good thing. They’re also resistant to censorship and, in some cases, reasonably privacy-conscious
Cunts, the lot.
A vast minority of this community interacts with llm ever and it shows
Let me assure you that I’m very lazy. I will passionately start using LLM’s as soon as they can do things that I need done… but it seems like that could take awhile.
Impressive flex
AI is the borg.
It is inherently evil in its creation and uses.
It doesn’t have to be, but it largely is.
I’ve started to think of LLMs like a worm, running around copying and pasting gobbledegook. It’s the ultimate filter, the gibberish curtain of advertising
One more generation of this shit, two at most, and tech will be working for the people again, unless we blow everything to smithereens before then.
you’re weirdly optimistic…
Hide it from the public? All you have to do is just think about it.
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.
Actually surprised how candid some of these statements are. Maybe points to more internal resistance than I would have assumed… like, they see the problem.
Their focus on threats to media companies is probably borne out of fear of litigation, so maybe they only pay a lil lip service to how they also hurt “content creators” (people).
Could also be that they know that when talking to the representatives of runaway financial automatons like multinational corporations, they have to appeal in terms the machine will understand.
