Grand theft automated

ملخص مفصل

In a recent major article in The Sydney Morning Herald, leading journalist Peter Hartcher wrote that for Australia to have “early access to future frontier AI tools” it would need…

In a recent major article in The Sydney Morning Herald, leading journalist Peter Hartcher wrote that for Australia to have “early access to future frontier AI tools” it would need to persuade AI corporations “to build their data centres here and, crucially, train some of their models here”.

The problem for Hartcher – as it is for the AI companies, the arguments of which he seems in agreement with – is that companies such as Anthropic are “not planning to train its models here or anywhere in Australia”.

“Anthropic’s founder, Dario Amodei, says he’d like to. But he won’t if his company is forced to pay Australian copy-right fees.”

But it is not true now. The court filings quoted above are from just one major case among a proliferating number of major cases being brought by many powerful businesses and organisations against AI companies in America and elsewhere. That is why AI companies have been forced to negotiate major licence deals with everyone from Reddit to Le Monde, from Getty Images to the Bodleian Library. That’s why Anthropic just paid out US$1.5 billion to authors in a historic settlement.

But of course they don’t like paying. They didn’t pay the creators whose work forms the fuel of their technology for many years and they hate doing it now. As OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman wrote in an internal document in 2017, he was “deeply motivated by the gazillions” he hoped to gain by commercialising OpenAI’s technology. Not by curing cancer. Not by productivity gains. By gazillions.

But don’t take my word for it – listen to what the attorney-general’s department’s own assistant secretary, Jenna Priestly, said on the matter in October at the parliamentary inquiry examining artificial intelligence when questioned by Nationals Senator Ross Cadell (as reported in an excellent article by Karen Middleton in Inside Story).

So there you have it straight out of a leading bureaucrat’s mouth. Just when the “largest theft of labor in human history” was beginning to come to an end…

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من The Monthly. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.