This is a classic case of tragedy of the commons, where a common resource is harmed by the profit interests of individuals.

No, it’s not. It would be if all of this content was licensed as Creative Commons and had no author rights, but as could be seen a while back with the openai shadow library thing, these corporations are actively stealing content to train their models. This is corporate theft, but the culprits are too prominent and rich to ever face any repercussions.

And it’s not like it’s a new thing, Google Images was based completely around the idea that, if an image is on the web, Google somehow has the right to store it in their own servers and present it to users with ads. Small youtubers had to go through years of getting their videos randomly claimed through content ID by well known and huge scam accounts, creating a whole business out of pretending to own other people’s stuff. M$ Github trained copilot on repositories without any regard for it breaking copyleft (i.e. no attribution in case of replicated code).

It’s standard practice to simply not ask permission before potentially algorithmically wrecking somebody’s livelihood for these companies, sometimes not even informing them of afterwards (i.e. the mystical YouTube “Algorithm” that keeps changing without so much as patch notes, and the cargo cult it spawned).

For them (and for the rest of the ruling class, obviously), (intellectual) property rights exist in a hierarchical level, and so long as you are on the top everything below you is free real estate.

And the best part is that these “AI” content generation systems are still comically bad when actually put into practice, but the corporations feel the unending urge to deploy them ASAP because they’d rather have a lot of complete garbage content to be consumed, than to pay living wages. Burgers will literally employ rotting zombies if it means they can skimp on salaries and increase unemployment to drive down the rest of the wages.

Got a bit worked up there lol.

I don’t like using the term clickbait if it’s not egregiously done, but, whatever you wanna call it, this article title definitely did that a bit of over selling in the title.

Spoiler: another article pointing out some legitimate and some “meh” concerns over AI and what it means for the future. I don’t personally think this is much to be overly worried about, but, hey, who knows.

One interesting thing in the middle mentions the EU apparently working on laws to limit AI “globally.” I think we all understand the EU is certainly powerful, but if you don’t have agreements with the US/Canada and China as well, then it doesn’t really matter what Europe says.

And the interesting part for me isn’t so much them all agreeing on restrictions, but more so why they almost definitely won’t agree. I’m considering what insane shit the EU (and US if it gets to that stage of discussion) is gonna cram in that obviously strays from AI-land over into what specific talking point liberals are raging about at the moment of the discussions. I just can’t see a world where they write any honest agreement that isn’t meant to somehow fuck China harder than everyone else which China will rightfully say they won’t sign and then blaming whatever fallout is to come from AI on China. Obviously I’d hope to be proven wrong, but, I don’t see any other outcomes in the near future where the west is just gonna flail all over the place trying to stop the inevitable continuation of Chinese dominance.