Theft Is Subjective

Some years ago, I watched two men steal food from a coffee chain in London. They were not subtle about it — they went to the sandwich chiller, took a few items, and walked off. The funny thing is that nobody intervened, despite everyone seeing it. Staff continued to make drinks, queueing customers looked away, and those of us at tables stayed seated. We were all, I think, struck by the odd mix of brazenness and shame that the men displayed, and they were very visibly ashamed.

Had circumstances been different — say, two aggressive men stealing from an independent café, or taking children's lunches away from them — there would doubtless have been more to the event. (At least, I hope those scenarios would raise hackles). But, two hungry guys pinching sustenance from a multi-million pound business? Forget it. The law might be metaphorical black ink on white paper, but morality is different. In your heart, theft isn't just the act of stealing — it matters who's stealing from whom, and why.

AI companies using my articles as training data without my permission, and without compensating me, feels a lot like theft. At least morally. And there is some precedent to say that it’s legally troublesome as well — publishers, for instance, are allowed to place constraints on what readers can do with books they’ve purchased. It’s reasonable for online content creators to expect some say over what counts as fair use of our work.

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Except, there is a much longer-standing precedent around inspiration and influence. You could, for example, read dozens of my articles, along with hundreds of other people's, and teach yourself how to write like we do. And so long as you don't write anything too similar to our existing work, you can happily use us as influences. You can even recreate parts of our work in clever ways and call them homages or pastiches, which is essentially what Quentin Tarantino has built a career doing.

Further to this, every writer you read (including me!) actively seeks inspiration from peers. I have a dedicated email address for receiving other newsletters, as well as several subscriptions to magazines I don’t like just for the isolated articles from writers I do enjoy. An AI being inspired in the same way, albeit with a bucket of linear algebra instead of human creativity, is objectively fine. Subjectively, however, the who, whom and why matter.

Consider that there are two visions of artificial intelligence. The first — and I'm labelling this the "good" one — exists underneath all the slop and tedious AI features polluting the internet right now, and it's a genuine technological leap forward. It is not, however, a leap that’s easily monetized with digestible, consumer-facing applications.

In fact, if I name it accurately as 'information retrieval over massive amounts of unstructured data', you'll see why AI's marketing guys aren't falling over themselves to promote this vision. But in my field — healthcare — it’s allowing analysis of a vast amount of hitherto "buried" data, and that analysis is already contributing better patient outcomes. I would violate every copyright on Earth for the smallest improvement.

The other vision of AI is harder to explain and almost impossible to justify. Encoded in the mind-numbing AI content clogging your social feeds, and the soul-destroying conversations many of us have had with AI help-bots, is a simple message — "AI can do things that low-paid humans are doing". To unimaginative CEOs, this translates into "You can fire people and lower your staffing costs." Sadly, it is this vision of AI that values the new industry in the trillions.

Rubbing salt in the wound is the fact that AI companies are owned and run by established techno-elites. Sam Altman, for example, was part of the Silicon Valley furniture (and phenomenally rich) before he headed OpenAI. And, as for the wealth of his main competitors — Elon Musk is the world's richest person, and Google is Google. Watching these guys get even richer by selling a redundancy-making wealth concentration tool is pretty hard to stomach.

The who, whom and why is a rotten look.

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https://www.benjclarke.me/p/theft-is-subjective