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It isn’t theft because the technology fundamentally steals. It’s theft because the people in control of the technology fundamentally steal.
I’m not talking about basement dwellers with a 3090 either. People using their m2 to generate lactating joe Biden fanfic aren’t the problem like multi-billion dollar companies taking advantage of the webs openness to train models that will be used to sell generative services replacing the creators of the stuff they were trained on are.
It’s the enclosures all over again.
Now when people speak out about it they’re called luddites and we don’t have the historical literacy to say “yes, I will smash this and any mill used to oppress me”.
people struggling for a way to express how massive incredibly powerful companies are literally building technology that will take their livelihoods away aren't gonna develop a vocabulary for the exact thing that's happening.
they're stealing. it's theft.
it doesn't matter that the precise thing happening isn't what we would legally call theft. the people saying ai is theft believe that their only chance to keep the corporate users of the technology from destroying their future and leaving them with nothing is to mobilize now using language that everyone understands. so they're calling it theft.
those people are wrong btw, they can't win even a tiny victory against the entire economic system that's decided the way itll extract profit from the tech sector is by automating labor.
thats the difference between which side of the spear youre on.
if you got the point youre yelling "ahh, dont, youre literally killing me! please, if you have any humanity in you save me from this monster!" if you have the stick end youre yelling "oh fuck off, the severe hemorrhage is killing you, stop lying! check out what happens when i twist this sucker!" when youre on the sidelines youre just eating popcorn and arguing about minutiae like us.
to your last point, i'd be more worried about historical literacy. a calculator can act as a bandage for lack of numeracy, no machine will bridge the gap in understanding that pedantry mobilized against justice sails through.
Im not saying any of those things. I went to great lengths to express explicitly and through use of historical parallel that what people are angry about is an attempt to cut them out of the productive process and reduce the quality of their lives.
the examples you tried to put in my mouth are laughable and betray a deep misunderstanding of history.
scriveners existed alongside printers for a hundred years that i know of for myriad reasons and still exist today. there was a tradition of offering both longhand and printed services at shops and during the expansion of the printing press one way that scriveners dealt with the new technology was by writing letters for people and performing recording duties at events. if what you said was true we simply wouldn't see longhand documents after 1500.
a better parallell with automobiles would be coachbuilders, but of course cars didn't come with bodies for seven decades during which you'd go to the coachbuilder and have a custom coach built to your specification on top of the rolling chassis. that's still done today for heavy equipment and specialty stuff. if we wanted to take the traditional turn of phrase it'd be that the internal combustion engine put buggywhip makers out of business overnight but that process actually took the better part of fifty years. even though the market for whips dried up over that time, whip makers were skilled producers of leather goods, and found plenty of work some of which was in the outfitting of the cars themselves. we can look at the production records of these various industries and see that it took decades for these changes to happen and they didn't amount to an upending of the labor relation.
the last example you use is just absurd. the electronic word processor found a market even as computers in offices rose to dominance over electronic typewriters specifically because they were simpler and cheaper than computers and allowed administrative staff to handle digital files and formats. even today secretaries use the computer to perform a variety of duties that would have been done in the past with typewriters, carbon copy machines and electronic word processors. those jobs didn't go away, they were intensified. If what you said was true there would be a drop in secretary jobs when the word processor comes out, or when the word processing software suite comes out. as it turns out, secretary jobs don't peak till 2015. so something different is going on there. it's worth noting that everyone classifies secretaries and administrative assistants together, so if youre using the definition from the 40s then you might have a point.
and again, i never said any of those things, i'm just bushwacking your crappy arguments to pluck the low hanging fruit that the person conflating things here is you.
I have consistently held that the use of the open internet to train models that will be used to sell generative services is theft of the commons in the same way as the enclosures. I also drew a parallel between the people calling AI theft now and the luddites of yore.
you even acknowledged this fact by saying it's like theft of labor.
Okay straight out of the gate, if you were talking about the 40s then why did you bring up the word processor? That technology wasn’t developed until the 50s and didn’t enter the business world in a form we could talk about in the modern parlance until the 70s. Heck, I think even then you’d have a very long time to go till there was any displacement of secretarial jobs and you’d have to contend with the transition to administrative assistant as both a name, job description and workload for that particular work force.
I’ll query the bls later to figure out about clerks and data entry but my thought at first blush is that you’re making stuff up there, considering americas transition to a service based economy and data entry in particular spending the first two decades of the century on the rise but imma hold off for now.
I never mentioned the tragedy of the commons, it’s a fallacy used to justify the theft of the commons through enclosure (I know this is confusing, here I’m not talking about just the period called the enclosures, but the technique of taking control of commonly held resources).
I wanna restate the thing we’re talking about:
When you say that AI in corporate hands just changes things, what specifically does it change? Does it use a resource held in common to create products that replace the people who developed that resource? Does it do so without compensation or consent?
Tell me, what is it called when you take something without compensation or consent and use it to profit to the absolute detriment of the creator, owner or rightsholder?
There’s a bunch of legal terminology for the different types of theft, but for the person trying to simply make the public aware that they’re being screwed: it’s theft.
The language around copyright started as theft. The language around theft of labor is still theft. The language around patents started as theft. It’s theft.
We need a new word to specifically refer to this process of digital enclosure, but I hope you can see how this particular process isn’t the same as any of the examples of labor saving technologies you brought up and is fundamentally the same as a process of taking the commons that we’ve seen in the past.
there's a lot in this comment and i don't want to engage with every little thing in there so lets focus in on what we are actually talking about: is AI theft?
the argument i've made multiple times is not that the technology as a concept can only be used to steal, but that the people developing, using and monetizing it are stealing.
I made sure to exclude individual users from this framing because the understanding that allows us to consider AI (not as a kind of matrix math, but as a technology primarily mobilized by huge incredibly wealthy companies with monetary interest in its deployment and use) as theft is unconcerned with individual users changing their relationship to creative technology and its output.
to restate that argument and get us back on track: AI (once again, not the matrix math, but the set of interconnected technologies built around a proprietary form of it that are being mobilized for profit by enormous incredibly powerful companies) is theft because the people in control of it steal. the closed technology of AI is predicated on open and free access to data for training without any pretense of compensation made to the creators of that data, the maintainers of resources like apis, servers and databases used to access that data or any expectation that the end model will ever be made public. the technology of AI is intended to be used to generate profit, and as such those in control of it have every motive to avoid compensating the people who created, hosted, cataloged and made available the training data or releasing the model to the public. it represents a leverage of public goods for private gain in very explicit terms and this understanding is even part of the pitch to investors.
Now lets look at the effects that AI (once again, the interlocking set of technologies used by google et al. not the concept of matrix mathematics) has had just in the past year because of this relationship to public data. hosts of historic information acting as public goods have incurred significant costs, sources of information once kept open have beed gated to prevent crawling and access to "content" previously viewed as simply fodder for ad draws has been restricted because of it's new status as training data.
That last one should have particular resonance given that reddit planned to monetize peoples posts and comments as training data to sweeten their IPO.
now we need to talk about the word theft because we both recognize that its' particular legal meaning isn't really applicable to this situation and that western legal verbiage has actually avoided enclosure in general. it would be very easy to simply take a pedantic reading of the word theft and then say "it's not theft for that reason!", but neither you nor I will do that because we are interested in discussing this new technology and the developments around it. in lieu of saying "monetizing the commons and taking actions that lead to their restriction" every time we need to talk about whats happening, we need a word that means roughly that.
historically, we can see many examples of the word "theft" used in that way, all the way back to the enclosures but even farther if we like. so because of it's historical use and broad meaning in the vernacular we can choose theft as the word to mean "monetizing the commons and taking actions that lead to their restriction".
Now that i've restated the argument and defined the terms, lets take a look at your claim that AI is no different than any other technology using your own examples:
The printing press did not monetize the commons or restrict them. an argument could be made that its widespread use lowered the barrier to entry for massive amounts of human knowledge and literacy in general, so it actually had the opposite effect. The automobile did act as an enabler for the monetization and enclosure of the commons through the development of the highway system and jaywalking laws, restricting roadways to those who could afford cars. so that could be a good example, but you don't invoke it, choosing instead to reference its effect on leather-working industries. word processors, either as physical machines or software programs do not monetize or enclose the commons on their own, however a person could make the (i think weak) argument that proprietary file formats are a form of enclosure. You don't though instead claiming that the word processor put secretaries out of work.
so, it seems like AI (hopefully for the last time: as a set of technologies leveraged to control and monetize public goods, not matrix mathematics) is significantly different than past technological advances but very similar to some events.
Hey I’m not gonna do two comment threads with you when you wont even stick to the one we have going. If you wanna stick with this one, reply to this comment and let the other one go. I’ll post this preface in my response to your other comment too.
I explained in detail how AI (in almost every case parenthetically explaining like this that I’m not talking about matrix mathematics, but a complex set of interlocking technologies mobilized by powerful companies to profit off of public work) affects our commons.
I also explained how the formal western legal holding of the word theft isn’t useful in this case, but in lieu of a word that has more pertinence, the widely used vernacular of theft is perfectly fine.
Now I need you to recognize that in light of those explanations, being precious about the words particular meaning instead of talking about the actual problem at hand amounts to deploying pedantry to avoid weighing in on the dispute.
So maybe let’s start from the start: what do you think should be done in light of the effect that AI (long explanation that I’m not talking about matrix mathematics here) is having?
Hey I’m not gonna do two comment threads with you when you can’t even stick to the one we have going. If you wanna stick with this one, reply to this comment and let the other one go. I’ll post this preface in my response to your other comment too.
I have held that AI (parenthetical explanation) is theft. You have tried over and over again to put words in my mouth, please stop. I’m trying hard to engage in good faith with you.
In your example the technology of manipulating all levels of government to gain control of massive tracts of land against the wishes of owners, residents and users of the area (and to the detriment of nature) is theft. Not in a legal sense, because the legal system has no interest in upholding the rights of those left out of that process, but in a common use sense.
That technology could be used by individuals and perhaps not be called theft but it’s not. It’s always deployed to the benefit of capital.
Do some reading on the luddites. They’re very interesting!