Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

Weryj

I think it’s more like ‘The absolute maximum possible degree of theft’ there can’t be larger, it’s everything current and past.

jacquesm

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling. It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

gyosko

And here we are, just watching and doing nothing..

Neil44

I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.

proc0

If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.

sajithdilshan

If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.

American87

I remember techchrunch.com making the argument that IP Infringment != Theft in the music piracy era.. how quickly the tide turns :)

leonidasrup

In case of programming. How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories? This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license. Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses? What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone. https://consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/estimating-the-total-...

TutleCpt

The most shocking point is that they have a Microsoft exec who knows what he's talking about.

wj

How is this different from Microsoft scraping to build Bing? Honest question. There is a line in the sand somewhere apparently.

noosphr

I'd call the introduction of copyright the largest theft of human labor in history. No one was compensated for all the free labor they did before the introduction of copyright which copyright holders then privatized. For example the Disney corporation would have had to pay the Brother's Grimm estate for the use of Snow white under the copyright regime they instilled in 1998 with the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. That we are finally having a sane pendulum swing towards no copyright is a breath of fresh air. The only way the AI bubble could improve the world more is if we end up becoming a Type I Kardashev civilization to feed the data centers. Then when the bubble pops we suck up all the extra CO2 with all the now idle nuclear power plants we can't shut down. At the same time it's truly baffling going on a site called _hacker_ news and seeing corpo talking points from the 90s/00s regurgitated wholesale. Information wants to be free.

47282847

“Information wants to be free“. It’s not “theft of labor”; the work was already done. If anything it is theft of “intellectual property” (aka “copyright infringement”), if you believe that is a thing, but not of the “labor” that went into it. My personal take: anyone producing content, everyone’s creativity, is fed by something that others did before. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants composed of previous generations and their “content’s” distribution and dissemination. I have an immense gratitude for all the labor before me that I was and am allowed to partake; without that, I would be nothing. Sharing information is an act of love; gatekeeping it is short-sighted greed. New technologies have always “killed” previous “labor”, out of which new opportunity grows. I just wished the collected data was public. I hope we all get a mega-leak at some point.

nullbio

It's humanities collective knowledge and work. That's why nobody should ever buy the narrative of distillation being a crime or theft. It should be a human right to distill these models. Distillation should be being provided as a service.

sedan_baklazhan

AI overall is the ultimate piracy crime. I wonder what a token cost would be if AI companies were to pay royalties to every author who made their business even possible.

alansaber

Spiderman pointing

jappgar

All the "LOL you wouldn't steal a car???" posts in this thread miss the point entirely. AI is cannibalizing information. It is literally destroying information and impoverishing those who would produce more of it. At a long time scale, AI dominance is apocalyptic even if it never intentionally hurts anyone.

sebastiangrill

I think so too. The only way to redeem this theft would be to force all AI companies to open source their models if they cannot prove that copyrighted material was not used to train them.

totetsu

Are those factory workers we saw photos of now, wearing cameras to capture the movement of their hands stitching getting compensated for a generations worth of wages? Do they even have any choice but to give away the copy-right to their labor?

pbasista

I do not understand what "theft" they are talking about. Those AI bots were scraping publicly accessible internet. Publicly. Accessible. Of course there are some parts of the publicly accessible internet which host content that may be considered illegal or has been obtained illegally. If those AI bots used such content as well, it is fair to call it out as wrong, in my opinion. But that is a separate topic. Blindly calling scraping of publicly accessible internet a "theft" is, in my opinion, disingenuous. Especially when coming from a company operating a web search engine. Which itself has its own bots scraping the same parts of the internet 24/7.

tom2026hn

The problem isn’t just “stealing the fruits of human labor”, it’s also driving down the value of human skills and even taking away human jobs.