British artists are fighting against the theft of their material from AI - but they need our help

“Some men rob you with a six-gun
And some with a fountain pen.”
- Woody Guthrie in ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’

The world of AI is overflowing with gangsters. Constructed without moral foundations, AI doesn’t even think it is stealing the data it trains on, because this is how business is done in the Valley of Pimps and Pushers (aka Silicon Valley).

To replace artists, writers, programmers, support professionals, and others, AI must first become an apprentice to these professionals. It must learn from them, copy them, and ultimately steal from them. And it has every right to do that because according to Microsoft AI grifter boss, Mustafa Suleyman, if you publish something digitally, then you have given up all your rights.

“I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web,” Suleyman has said, “the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been ‘freeware’, if you like, that’s been the understanding.”

What a grifter. Typical tech bro. Thinks he can steal whatever he wants. Like Zuckerberg, he has absolute contempt for the content creator.

“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says there are complex copyright questions around scraping data to train AI models, but he suggests the individual work of most creators isn’t valuable enough for it to matter,” Adi Robertson wrote for The Verge.

“I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this,” Zuckerberg said.

Can you feel the arrogance?

Can you smell the disdain?

Can you taste the contempt?

Mustafa Suleyman

STEALING YOUR DATA

Big Tech, which assiduously protects its own software and hardware copyright, believes it can steal the content off everyone else. And with AI, the whole business model collapses if Big Tech can’t steal.

“The only practical way for these tools to exist is if they can be trained on massive amounts of data without having to license that data,” said Sy Damle, a lawyer representing Andreessen Horowitz, a heavy investor in AI. “Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long,” the New York Times, said of Facebook, so they were willing to “cut corners” – and face lawsuits in the race to acquire content.

Creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI openly admitted in its submission to the UK House of Lords that, “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

So guess what? In their rush to impress Trump, and to attract Big Tech investment, the UK government sucked up to the aspiring overlords by deciding that Big Tech should get everything it asked for – for free!

The UK Make it Fair campaign summarised the development succinctly.

“The government wants to change the UK’s laws to favour big tech platforms so they can use British creative content to power their AI models without our permission or payment.”

If you don’t let us steal, we don’t have a business model, AI squeals.

We want to steal your data, then we want to steal your job. AI cannot exist without stealing.

Google wants to steal everything. It asked its in-house privacy team to rewrite the so called “terms of service” so that Google could do what Google needed to do. The team dutifully complied, of course. Morals and ethics went out the window – again.

“The team was told specifically to release the new terms on the Fourth of July weekend, when people were typically focused on the holiday,” The New York Times reported. Sneakiness, sleight of hand, burying the theft in reams of unreadable crap which, of course, pretends that they care about you and your rights – it is at the heart of how they do business.

Paloma Faith with the Make It Fair campaign.

REBELLION AND RESISTANCE

Sometimes they don’t even bother pretending.

The former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt is honest enough to admit that stealing is stealing – though the way he looks at it, that doesn’t matter if you’ve got good enough lawyers. It is the Google way after all.

Schmidt was asked to give a guest lecture to a group of Stanford students on the subject of ethics, with the key theme being “opportunities and risks.” He enthusiastically encouraged the students to steal content – and therefore to act criminally – so as to develop killer apps. If the apps were successful, they could then “hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up.” That’s typically how those things are done in the Valley of Pimps and Pushers, Schmidt said. So true.

Artists in the UK – including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Sam Fender and Damon Albarn – responded by issuing a silent album, titled Is This What We Want?, in protest. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Björn Ulvaeus  of Abba and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, among almost 50,000 more already, also demanded that the government must not allow AI to pillage the work of artists. There have been reports that the British government is willing to step back, but the likelihood is that this will be marginal. Smart people are sceptical that the legislation – to be announced later this year – will offer adequate protection to artists.

So let’s not leave this up to artists. We all can do something to resist.

One of the greatest ways of resisting is to reclaim our data. Demand our rights over our data. Store the data you want to store long term off-Cloud on a hard drive and keep that hard drive disconnected from the Internet. Delete the data you don’t need, which is the vast majority of data that we have created.

Deleting data is one of the greatest acts of rebellion and resistance, and it is also hugely beneficial for our environment. The less data there is to store, the fewer Data Centres we need. And as we know, data centres use vast amounts of energy, create massive amounts of e-waste and consume an unbelievable amount of water.

If we want to go to the next level of resistance, we can lure the greedy AI to feed – for free! – on corrupt and rotten data that will in turn corrupt its insides and workings.

Fight corrupt AI with corrupt data? Now there’s a perfect circle…