Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
I’m not sure they can be compared fairly. Slavery and AI scraping do both have “unpaid labor” in common. But “unpaid labor” is hardly the most horrific feature of either of them. And to reduce them down to that metric so they can be compared ends up downplaying the unique horrors of each.
I think the important part to take from the quote is that: he knew it was wrong, he knew the degree to which it was wrong was extreme, and he knew it was wrong in a particular way that the world hasn’t seen before.
While AI scraping is a massive theft of labor, I think chattel slavery has this beat.
I’m not sure they can be compared fairly. Slavery and AI scraping do both have “unpaid labor” in common. But “unpaid labor” is hardly the most horrific feature of either of them. And to reduce them down to that metric so they can be compared ends up downplaying the unique horrors of each.
I think the important part to take from the quote is that: he knew it was wrong, he knew the degree to which it was wrong was extreme, and he knew it was wrong in a particular way that the world hasn’t seen before.