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.
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.
Gonna get real weird soon when they run out of rich new training data and they begin to consume their own shit. When that happens their entire model will collapse and if the bubble hasn’t popped already that may be what causes it.
“I am sitting in a room”
What seriously worries me about these companies is the fact they somehow act like what ChatGPR is doing is 100% out of their control. Dude, you built the LLM, you trained it on stolen data.
Stop acting like “oh evil LLM is built on theft and is hacking all these companies and will doom us all, whatever will we doooo?!” when it was your damn company that started this whole crap and you’re always blabbering about general AI and how this time it will definitely arrive by 2029 if they give you another 10 billion dollars. I can’t with these clowns. Remember when Musk had us believe he wanted to save the world and came from poverty? Yeah, good times
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!
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.
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time: It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain,’” the document said.
Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, testified under oath that after ripping content from the New York Times and other news sites, clicks to those news sites fully cratered, falling by more than 90 percent on Bing.
Documents obtained during the court proceedings found that OpenAI created “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” to which OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman said “ah, nice.” Microsoft executive Brent Hecht wrote that LLMs steal content “without ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, [which] necessarily threatens the economic stability of those who create the content.”
Fuck these guys.
That’s because, thus far, they get away with choosing not to distribute any of their trillions of dollars to the suppliers of the information they consume - money has only gone to the suppliers of hardware and power, and to influencing politicians and rewarding investors. That’s their choice, and they should not be allowed to continue to make that choice. Good luck to the NYT.
https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/new-york-times-transgender-controversy
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/15/1157181127/nyt-letter-trans
https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/
NYT is transphobic and pro-genocide. I hope they go bankrupt, and papers with fewer conservative biases survive. Unfortunately, the opposite will happen. Billionaire-backed news will run at a loss to manufacture propaganda, while independent journalism dies.
Internet search is terrible now. Every website I go to reads like it was generated by an LLM.
Glad I spent my teens and 20s getting stoned and reading the shit out of wikipedia before this shit happened. Can’t trust anything written online now.
Because it was generated by a llm.
I did a search for the torque spec on a castle nut last week and the second result was for a nut (as in, food nuts that you eat) website and the llm had gone all in on nuts and added a page about castle nuts. It even generated an image of a castle for the top because… castle nut.
It proceeded to provide vague instructions and a torque recommendation of 2x the actual spec.
Then there was the other one about a small 4 stroke engine where it stated “other sites will say you don’t need to mix oil with gas but you absolutely must!” (You don’t and shouldn’t) … I wonder how many people have fucked up their shit by trusting llm garbage without knowing better.
Running into this same problem but with parenting. My wife is constantly asking me to “Google if it’s good/bad if our baby is doing” X. And I’ll find 20 slopposts from dozens of “parenting” websites that all give conflicting answers. This week, I asked my parents for their copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare because we need some solid reference. Sorry kiddo, you’re going to get raised like it’s 1987 because 2026 sucks.
Just give the baby a cigarette. It lubricates the lungs.
1987 not 1957
Relax guys, the very stable high IQ president of the united states will protect you. No meed for guardrails or regulations.
God the guardrails things. These stupid companies are all hyping up “We need to slow down, we need guard rails!”
Ok.
No one is fucking stopping you. Just… Slow yourself down, guardrail yourself.
Oh wait, it’s just an excuse to create regulatory capture.
It’s the theftbot manufacturers trying to have excuses in the public perception for why all their claims about their product don’t ever happen.
“We had to slow down for safety. All those things we promised are coming, just one more round of funding bro.”
They knew what they were doing every step of the way. They are criminals that need to be disarmed and locked away. And we need to create a new Internet from scratch somehow thanks to these donkeys.
If we make a new internet from scratch can we get rid of JavaScript too while we’re at it?
And make cookies illegal if not needed for transactions, functionality, or admin purposes?
