The pattern is very clear. Before creating Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg did an experiment: he surprised with Facemash.com from hundreds of photos of Harvard classmates, and was accused by the department of IT Services of violating the rules of the university. For the creation of the Image.net image bank, designed for deep learning in computer vision, the researchers hired the services of Amazon Mechanical Turk, which pays meager wages to do mechanical jobs, which led to having millions of mislabeled photographs (and a work of art that went viral: ImageNet Roulette, by Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, denouncing the aberrations of the science project). Cambridge Analytica went further and stole thousands of personal data from Facebook to manipulate the direction of the vote. In the history of the internet, there is a lot of theft that feeds behavioral engineering exercises and surveillance capitalism.
At the moment, there are several million-dollar lawsuits against OpenAI, which apparently followed the illegal dynamics to train the GPT language models, and against Stability AI, which may have illegally appropriated the photographs of the Getty Images online archive. To train the artificial intelligences that generate text and images, information has been gathered from all available sources. The statistical generation has learned from our digital libraries, with and without our permission.
“Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction”, said Pablo Picasso. He was referring to wild artists like himself, but human societies have also followed suit. The history of culture is a succession of great expropriations, material and symbolic. When the Sumerians conquered a city, they confiscated both the opponents’ tablets and the best scribes. As Lionel Casson explains in Las b la d’Alexandria, he accumulated the monumental heritage because he seized the scrolls that were on all the ships that arrived at his port to copy them. The great European museums show the fruits of a plunder that has lasted for centuries. Jeff Bezos built the Amazon empire thanks to an initial double appropriation: that of the prestige of the book and that of the name of humanity’s great ecological reserve.
The difference in OpenAI’s case has to do with speed. Never before had such a massive appropriation taken place in such a short time, nor had such remarkable results been achieved thanks to it. But everything points to the end of the permissiveness that has characterized our relationship with the big technology companies: the reactions have also been very fast. The robbery of the century gives rise to the debate of the century. In social networks, in journalism, in classrooms and in courts.
