Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'

It's the robbery of all of our culture to sell it back to us at a mark-up. Crimes this large are crimes against humanity. So many people whose life's work got appropriated without consideration, compensation or consent it is baffling.

It is said that at the heart of every great fortune there is a great crime, so it should be no surprise that the most valuable companies on the planet will most likely result from this crime. And given that justice can be bought by those with the most money you can forget about anything coming of this.

In case of programming.

How much do the current LLMs invent solutions for user tasks, how much they just copy and adopt existing open-source solutions from from Github and other code repositories?

This not a problem for open-source code under permissive software license, but works derived from open-source code with copyleft software license should be also under copyleft license.

Could the biggest commercial benefit of LLMs be just working around limitations of copyleft licenses?

What is the monetary value of human work put into copyleft software and later used to train LLMs? It's hard to estimate, but the study "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution", estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.

https://consortiuminfo.org/metalibrary/estimating-the-total-...

If someone asked what is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' I would have thought slavery.

I understand the sentiment and partly agree. But also, the original has not gone anywhere. You're free to accumulate knowledge in the old way just as before. So maybe it's not theft of knowledge that we should be angry about, it's something else harder to define.

I remember techchrunch.com making the argument that IP Infringment != Theft in the music piracy era.. how quickly the tide turns :)

I think it’s more like ‘The absolute maximum possible degree of theft’ there can’t be larger, it’s everything current and past.

If corporations weren't already owning the consumer, with AI it does this by many orders of magnitude. If something isn't done to prevent AI from being used to farm the masses for data, we will be living in a sci-fi dystopia without a doubt.

And here we are, just watching and doing nothing..

Well… Marx would say “theft of labor” is fundamental for the capitalist system to operate. The sin is when you “steal” from the capitalists. That’s why you can’t distill from a commercial model.