by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(Truthout) In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws.
From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI tools that tech companies say will supposedly benefit all of us. In a recent statement to legislative bodies, OpenAI claimed that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” It remains to be seen if courts will agree, but it’s not looking good for content creators. In February, a California court dismissed large portions of a case brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors.
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Some of these cases may reveal ongoing negotiations, as some companies figure out how to pressure others into sharing a piece of the AI pie. Publisher Axel Springer and the social media platform Reddit, for example, have recently made profitable deals to license their content to AI companies. Meanwhile, a legislative attempt in the United Kingdom that would have protected content generated by the creative industries has been abandoned.
But there is a larger social dilemma involved here that might not be as easy to detect: What about our content — content that we don’t usually associate with copyright laws, like emails, photos and videos uploaded to various platforms? There are no high-profile court cases around that. And yet, the appropriation of this content by generative AI reveals a monumental social and cultural transformation.
It’s easy to miss this transformation, because after all, this kind of content is considered a sort of commons that nobody owns. But the appropriation of this commons entails a kind of injustice and exploitation that we are still struggling to name, one not captured in the copyright cases. It’s a kind of injustice that we’ve seen before in history, whenever someone claims ownership of a resource because it was just there for the taking.
In the early phases of colonialism, colonizers such as the British claimed that Australia, the continent they recently “discovered,” was in legal terms “terra nullius” — no one’s land — even though it had been inhabited for millennia. This was known as the Doctrine of Discovery, a colonial version of “finders, keepers.”
Such claims have been echoed more recently by corporations wanting to treat our digital content and even our biometric data as a mere exhaust that’s just there to be exploited. The Doctrine of Discovery survives today in a seamless move from cheap land to cheap labor to cheap data, a phenomenon we call “data colonialism.” The word “colonialism” is not being used metaphorically here, but to describe a very real emerging social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the continuous appropriation of human life through data. Data colonialism helps us understand today’s transformations of social life as extensions of a long historical arc of dispossession. All of human culture becomes the raw material that is fed to a commercial AI machine from which huge profits are expected. Earlier this year, OpenAI began a fundraising round for $7 trillion, “more than the combined gross domestic products of the UK and France,” as the Financial Times put it.
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