AI and OpenAI and NonProfit versus ForProfit
I wonder if OpenAI should revert itself to a nonprofit and donate itself to the US government, with Microsoft, etc., writing down its investment to zero, and any additional funding put up by Elon Musk, etc. Would that help with federal deficits or debts, and respect its founding charter and the original team? I don’t like how it has played fast and loose with copyrights infringements and how it has effectively deceived its founding team members. If it goes public, isn’t that very obviously OpenAI infringing on copyrights to profit unfairly? I believe that’s truly the wrong path to go on if we make it permissible to derive works off others’ original content. If it goes public and stays a for-profit, didn’t OpenAI very obviously deceive many of its early employees to go work for them?
Then what happens next? Original creators have little incentive to create, and AI slops up more slop on itself as it regurgitates its own content over and over until it’s nonsensical? Then sure, AI quickly surpasses human intelligence as humans get stupider thinking AI slop is “smart.” I’ve already had to experience Bill Gates f***ing up education after monopolizing his software mediocrity. How much value have we already burned away just to fuel Microsoft’s middling work? How much is our world overheating because there’s a ton of sloppy Microsoft enabled files just blowing through resources? Must we make the same mistakes again?
Frankly, the journalism industry has long been abused by Big Tech. I am a fan of A.G. Sulzberger and the NY Times (https://www.nytco.com/press/a-i-journalism-and-the-uncertain-future-of-the-public-square/) illuminating the risk of a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy — the truth, understanding, and accountability provided by original journalism — continues to dry up…. The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations] … is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits.” AI’s rise has been fueled by “a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale.”
There are other innovators that are putting their own likeness and knowledge inside AI’s specific to them. That’s actual innovation and new work. Those AI’s could merge and integrate themselves after, if appropriate. Like make an AI avatar for every US president and then merge them all and see what comes out of that?
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Also from the NYT article:
“A.I. models are made with four basic ingredients.
The first is talent — the people who design the algorithms. The second is what tech companies call “compute.” That’s the infrastructure behind A.I., like chips and data centers. The third is energy, the electricity required to fuel these power-hungry products. The fourth is what tech companies call “data.” The word itself seems almost designed to make creative and expressive work sound trivial, a ubiquitous commodity. But “data” is often used, among other things, as a synonym for books, movies, music and journalism — what might more accurately be called “copyrighted content.”
Talent, compute, energy and data are all essential to the success of A.I. and, therefore, to the success of the tech giants.
The first three are paid for because — of course they are. No tech C.E.O. would dare suggest forcing the most talented engineers to work for free. To the contrary, they regularly offer pay packages worth tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars. Nor would they consider stealing chips from a Nvidia factory or illegally tapping a power line. Investors consider the potential financial rewards of A.I. to be so great that they are embracing losses that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers and power plants.
In contrast, A.I. companies take “data” without consent or compensation. Their explanations for the theft keep shifting. They say innovation requires it. They insist they’re just taking facts, which no one can own. They complain that deals take too long and cost too much. They claim the “fair use” doctrine allows them to take content for free anyway. Sometimes they even invoke national security — they warn that if A.I. companies are forced to pay, America will lose the technology race to China.
None of these arguments withstand scrutiny. A chatbot can only spit out “facts” because it illegally copied entire news articles, which enables it to borrow just as liberally from protected language and style as well. Building data centers and power plants is far more expensive and time consuming than hiring lawyers to draft licensing deals with news organizations. Fair use doesn’t allow this kind of harmful, substitutive copying, retention and regurgitation of a single work, let alone everything humanity has ever produced. In its competition with China, America weakens itself by abandoning the intellectual property protections that fuel innovation and power America’s creative enterprises.”
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“It’s a safe bet that such actions by the tech giants will fuel destructive trends already straining society. A continued decline in original reporting. A continued surge in misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, deepfakes and computer-generated slop. A public that continues to be radicalized by algorithms that amplify fear, anger and division.
Reporters are the ones enriching the public record with previously unknown information. That surprising fact. That telling detail. That quote from the eyewitness. That secret document. That bit of expert analysis. That photo, video, audio recording. Put simply, original reporting is very often how you know what you know. A.I. products, of course, cannot do this type of original reporting. They mine the public record but struggle to add to it.
Even the mining has been problematic. Research by the European Broadcasting Union found that the leading A.I. assistants significantly misrepresented the news in nearly half of all answers. Both Google and Apple, for example, have made major mistakes while using A.I. tools to rewrite news organizations headlines and new alerts that appear in their products. Because A.I. tends to be bad at expressing uncertainty, it’s often not just wrong, but confidently wrong. And unlike the news organizations they’re stealing from, A.I. companies don’t track or correct such errors, leaving their users without any way of knowing when they’ve been misled.””