If we take everything Big Tech says as a lie, then we wouldn’t be far off what is happening, rendering my recording of the examples I encounter in daily life unnecessary. We know they lie, and it would actually become more unusual to record the times they tell the truth or follow through with something.
Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded Google’s Deepmind AI unit (i.e. one lying Big Tech firm) and is now the head of AI at Microsoft (another lying Big Tech firm) lies about copyright law, by saying anything put on the web is fair game. The Verge has a good analysis. His words, on CNBC:
the social contract of that content since the ’90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, re-create with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware”, if you like, that’s been the understanding.
He’s dead wrong, of course, so either he is a fool, a liar, or a malicious actor. By his own argument, it does mean that he suggests that anything Google and Microsoft has ever put online is also fair game, if it falls under ‘fair use’ (which isn’t how fair use in copyright law works at all, but Suleyman is not going to let facts get in his way. It’s Big Tech tradition).
Maybe I need an entire copy of Windows 11 or Office 365 for review purposes, and that’s fair use as Suleyman defines it, so I guess I can do as I please with it, since they are posted online, including make copies.
Which really is what these “AI” companies are allegedly doing: they are ignoring copyright law and scraping data to feed their programs. If they can scrape ours, then we can scrape theirs, re-create and reproduce it, and treat it all as “freeware”.
We know that the reality is that such copying is illegal. They may argue that they have T&Cs out there to protect them. Well, so do we, and they haven’t stopped these crooks from training on our data.
Given how the US Supreme Court sees presidential immunity these days, would anyone trust anything from their country’s big institutions, ever again? Everyday Americans, fine. Big firms and their politicians and justice system? Not so much.
Putin’s really going to get his wish for a multipolar world, isn’t he? Which dodgy bloke with nukes should have the bigger say?
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