[neolefty]

This market is troubling. But I have a different question:

What does the long game look like for raw training data? How will AIs maintain the quality of their diet?

To compare, web search started — in the early days of Google — as a huge win because so much valuable information that was scattered around became findable. But over time it has become whac-a-mole with spam and AI copypasta, and now it's a struggle to keep returning good results, for any search engine.

[__MatrixMan__]

Just like how ads have integrated into everything, trying to get us to click away from the happy path, AI will be in everything, trying to get us to do things that it is not yet good at so that it can learn from us. Which would be fine if the newfound efficiencies were properly democratized.

[mateo1]

Yep. All these tech giants are taking the labour that people provided to the world in good faith in what I've seen described as a gift economy, and trying to lock it up. On the internet for the longest time people were providing their knowledge and fruits of labour for free, anticipating reciprocity (which on average they got). They stopped when reciprocity stopped. Platforms would monetize their efforts, control the distribution and often remove the reference to the creator.

These AI systems are being build on top of all the collective effort and resulting knowledge of the entire humanity. We can pretend they are just another private enterprise or we can acknowledge that they are something more than that.

And it's not just the productivity we could achieve with democratizing these systems. There's another danger. When big companies buy up all this intellectual property, what better choice would they have than to lock it up? At least until recently you could argue that IP rights owners were as entities incentivized to proliferate this knowledge, now the opposite is happening.

[__MatrixMan__]

Do you have a concrete example of something you're afraid of loosing access to? The examples that come to my mind are such that cutting people off from them would degrade the relevance of the AI that's trained on them, but maybe I'm overlooking something.

Like, if you prevent access to research in order to protect the moat around your AI product, you'll harm the research community that would otherwise be your users. So now they're looking for other jobs and you have no users.