Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”
Those statements and a series of other mask-off moments feature heavily in an unredacted court filing that was unsealed Thursday in the behemoth New York Times vs OpenAI copyright lawsuit that has been winding its way through the court system for years. In a filing asking for summary judgment (basically, a filing with the court asking it to rule), lawyers for the New York Times laid out a series of admissions made by Microsoft and OpenAI executives in documents and depositions that until now had remained either sealed or redacted at the request of Microsoft and OpenAI.
It’s easy to see why the AI companies wanted to hide this from the public. The statements, taken together, are some of the most damning indictments of the ways LLMs were trained, how they worked, and the immediate threat they pose to human labor. It is a reminder that even as AI becomes more powerful and companies try to shift the narrative to the supposed existential risk of “superintelligent” AI, the tools they have already built were created by stealing from human creativity and labor and are by definition existential threats to the human labor market.
What seriously worries me about these companies is the fact they somehow act like what ChatGPR is doing is 100% out of their control. Dude, you built the LLM, you trained it on stolen data.
Stop acting like “oh evil LLM is built on theft and is hacking all these companies and will doom us all, whatever will we doooo?!” when it was your damn company that started this whole crap and you’re always blabbering about general AI and how this time it will definitely arrive by 2029 if they give you another 10 billion dollars. I can’t with these clowns. Remember when Musk had us believe he wanted to save the world and came from poverty? Yeah, good times
I honestly don’t see a point where we can move past this without Sam altman, nadell, musk, etc all facing mandatory life time sentence without parole, work release etc.
I would also accept the removal of their heads.
I’d prefer if they were forced to pay royalties for all the work they stole to the people they stole it from. And, like, have someone actually force them to comply. They’d have to hire a Microsoft-sized compliance department just to figure this shit out and track payments.
Yeah, but with which money? All those AI companies are not and will never be profitable (and they’ll be the reason for the next stock market bubble pop)
Which is exactly why they are pivoting to “AI sucks, LLMs are dangerous…”
Better yet, seize their assets and make them try to make a go at it as a regular person.
Seize their assets and use that to pay creators whose works they stole.
I like how you think outside of the box.
Could you imagine Elon Musk running a fryer or injection mold for 8 hours? Who am I kidding? he’d never pass the piss test required to run the injection mold.
I’m sure many of them think they would just prove us wrong, and because they are so smart that they would just rebuild from the ground up on their own.
My concern is they could convince another rich person of this, and get them to invest in their newest scam.
There’d have to be some sort of stipulation that made it so nobody could do that. I don’t know how you’d do that, but it could probably be done. Are there any laws that prevent people convicted of fraud from doing the same thing again? Maybe something like that.
I would love to see them roofing houses or working in a foundry. Hell, even seeing them trying to be a janitor or something.
They could still grift their way to a life of comfort through book deals with Ayn Rand or something
I doubt it. Nobody who cares about what they’d have to say actually reads books, and they wouldn’t be able to afford a ghost writer anyway.
this is the way.
Internet search is terrible now. Every website I go to reads like it was generated by an LLM.
Because it was generated by a llm.
I did a search for the torque spec on a castle nut last week and the second result was for a nut (as in, food nuts that you eat) website and the llm had gone all in on nuts and added a page about castle nuts. It even generated an image of a castle for the top because… castle nut.
It proceeded to provide vague instructions and a torque recommendation of 2x the actual spec.
Then there was the other one about a small 4 stroke engine where it stated “other sites will say you don’t need to mix oil with gas but you absolutely must!” (You don’t and shouldn’t) … I wonder how many people have fucked up their shit by trusting llm garbage without knowing better.
Running into this same problem but with parenting. My wife is constantly asking me to “Google if it’s good/bad if our baby is doing” X. And I’ll find 20 slopposts from dozens of “parenting” websites that all give conflicting answers. This week, I asked my parents for their copy of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Childcare because we need some solid reference. Sorry kiddo, you’re going to get raised like it’s 1987 because 2026 sucks.
Try the 1940’s when the book was first published. Most of what he said, like talking to and listening to your kids and treating them like a human is really good. After a quick review of criticism it doesn’t appear there is much worthwhile other than some of his earlier views that did change later on (like male circumcision).
I can’t even fathom that level of frustration. At least I can only muck up a part or maybe an engine… not a little human : /
Sorry bud, and good luck.
Glad I spent my teens and 20s getting stoned and reading the shit out of wikipedia before this shit happened. Can’t trust anything written online now.
At least Wikipedia has sources cited.
Before AI it was SEO blogspam. Now they’ve just cut the human out.
I once looked for a tutorial on a process in a Minecraft mod and there was a site that gave out incorrect information that was obviously written by an LLM.
this website used to pop up in pretty much all web searches i made about retro gaming. looks like it’s blacklisted from qwant now, since i couldn’t find it anymore by searching and had to dig through my discord messages to find the link
“To give you an idea of the size range, Kirby’s Adventure, the largest officially released DS game, takes up 768 KB, while smaller games like Tetris weigh in at around 8MiB. The maximum recorded storage capacity of a Nintendo DS cartridge is 64 MB.”
and then right after that “Size Range: 8MiB to 512MB”, followed by:
“According to various sources, the average DS game size is 32mb to 64mb, with some games being larger or smaller. The actual average would be hard to calculate, but it’s likely somewhere between 128 KB and 256 KB.”
crazy stuff lol, it’s like it’s suffering from psychosis
Yeah I don’t even use ai so I can’t compare, but even paid search services are noticeably so much more frustrating.
weird how Chinese AI firms aren’t saying this - but then, they don’t have a massive fiscal crunch where they have to take delivery of trillions of dollars worth of contracted compute, that they haven’t yet found a market for . . . .
https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boom
If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were trying to angle for a bailout!
Relax guys, the very stable high IQ president of the united states will protect you. No meed for guardrails or regulations.
God the guardrails things. These stupid companies are all hyping up “We need to slow down, we need guard rails!”
Ok.
No one is fucking stopping you. Just… Slow yourself down, guardrail yourself.
Oh wait, it’s just an excuse to create regulatory capture.
It’s the theftbot manufacturers trying to have excuses in the public perception for why all their claims about their product don’t ever happen.
“We had to slow down for safety. All those things we promised are coming, just one more round of funding bro.”
Devil’s advocate, self regulation does not work. 9/10 companies can agree to cool it and if 1/10 presses on full steam ahead for whatever reason, then they can still do all the damage and they will be ahead of the curve.
We need laws and regulations that hold all companies accountable.
They want Trump to create the guardrails (the exact guardrails they tell him to create) before the midterms and the Republicans lose a bunch of seats.
That clown is legalizing all kinds of white collar crime, already. This kind of shit is nothing to him.
They knew what they were doing every step of the way. They are criminals that need to be disarmed and locked away. And we need to create a new Internet from scratch somehow thanks to these donkeys.
If we make a new internet from scratch can we get rid of JavaScript too while we’re at it?
And make cookies illegal if not needed for transactions, functionality, or admin purposes?
Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
(This protocol does not have to do anything with Google’s Gemini thing. It was created and named a bit earlier!)
The best succinct description of llm that I’ve read was “plagiarism machine”, because that’s basically what they are: automated plagiarism. At best they create a collage of other works, at worst they copy one work verbatim, but they never create something original because they can’t.
Copying something is a lot easier and thus cheaper than creating an original work from scratch, so genuine creators cannot hope to compete on cost. Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.
Short term that’s great for the neoliberal company executives: fire the expensive artists, create cheap slop with the plagiarism machine, and thus maximize profits now. That the plagiarism machine becomes stagnant because not enough new original works are being created is a future problem, by which time the current executives will have already jumped ship.
But while it’s great for the neoliberal business model, for the rest of society it will suck. So now that we have confirmation that the AI executives know how bad their products are, and that they were just publicly lying about it in the style of tobacco executives, will anything be done about this “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions”? Personally I doubt it, there’s too much regulatory capture.
Which leads to less people being able to afford to earn a living from creating works, which leads to less original works being created.
It’s why the only solution for AI is socialism.
It breaks every profit model and the wage form otherwise.
don’t base your thoughts on the plagiarism machine that can’t create anything new because that idea isn’t correct
Gonna get real weird soon when they run out of rich new training data and they begin to consume their own shit. When that happens their entire model will collapse and if the bubble hasn’t popped already that may be what causes it.
They’re already doing it. They call it distilling when they take it from another llm. Pretty sure most content was already stolen in the early days and they now rely on distillation and stealing new content.
So it’s like if everyone combined the backwash from their water bottles into a new drink…
Sounds super appealing!
Don’t get high off your own supply?
That’s my thought. So long as someone inputs anything new to the internet they will be able to scrape it and sell it as their product.
Pretty sure they mostly use the pre-AI internet (that they scraped and kept) and synthetic data currently. Probably trying (and failing so far or we’d have heard) to adapt to using video as training material at the moment, but developments there will likely apply to robotics at some point. Here’s hoping the current chuds have crashed and burned before then and that some sanity has taken over from unfettered capitalist oligarchs dreams of computer slavery.
Why don’t you thinj they have not adapted to video as training. Is that not what Flock does?
Flock does pattern recognition, a quite old piece of machine learning. Nothing to do with training a large language model or other ‘AI’ model.
They almost certainly use that to train AI. Big tech is aggregating the data from many places.
Nah, it’s in the name, Large Language Models, what gets marketed as ‘AI’, are trained on text. That’s why they’re ripping up secondhand books (and copyright law, but that never stopped them) at the moment. No one has really cracked Large Vision Model yet, although there are some primitive versions being attempted in robotics, mostly they translate to text, which is why general purpose robots aren’t a thing yet.
“I am sitting in a room”
Why do you think there has been such an emphasis on hacking with LLMs lately (especially by OpenAI). They figured out all those vulnerability databases were an excellent source for training material. In the past they scraped those, but just for general language training. Now they’ve specifically trained the models on the information within. Some team figured out how to use that data to train a model and have testing scenarios automated so they could write a good reward function. It wasn’t that they figured out the models are good at hacking, they ran out of content and found a new source of good data.
With all the books they’ve been scanning I wonder if the next thing is going to be a writing assistant or editor or something like that. Even though writing good books is an art form and the actual writing down of the words is the easiest part (still not easy tho).
These companies are starving for content and they’ve not just poisoned but absolutely destroyed the content well that is the internet. Given they were already hitting diminishing returns hard, it doesn’t matter too much to them probably. But more compute and storage has also been hitting diminishing returns hard and customers are complaining about the cost. So they are getting a bit desperate on how to improve these things at all.
Or they can just keep a database of actual data on their servers, instead of getting new data every single time for some fucking reason.
model collapse is the endgame. that’s the whole point of LLM.
What do you mean? Why would collapse be the endgame?
in a manner of speaking - you always end up there. not by design though. models operate via continuous refinement and you can only optimize a model so much until it is a mess and you need to figure out where to roll back. so you either get shit like semantic drift or variance decay and you can whack a mole it to an extent but then you hit the rlhf wall when the model starts gaming its reinforcement framework and the fat lady sings.
gaming its reinforcement framework
Well put. Never thought of it that way.
the only more or less workable way to keep it under control is maintaining a closed loop small-scale environment - kinda like NotebookLM where you upload documents and that’s all there is to work with - outside of that it is a mess.
It’s either agi or model collapse. For every AI system actually. If you have a high enough adoption you start to muss original data so if your AI is not self sufficient in time it will collapse, because it will be trained on its own data, which just is an incentive loop
and nothing changed.
NGL, I was kinda hoping something would destroy the internet and we could move to Reticulum/NomadNet/I2P/Tor
Shit’s been going downhill since 1999
Setting up a Reticulum node this week.
And wondering if there’s a matrix client that can use it, or if that’s something that needs to be made . . .
They’re very different.
You could try to do some kind of bridge server side or just add straight up identity/send/receive client side. You need RNSD running somewhere to hook.
Yeah, I’m just thinking that having chat rooms, etc, that cannot be shut down because they’re on Reticulum could be a very nice thing to have
it was, but 2001 really picked up the pace.
LLMs are NOT destroying the planet. It’s the humans running the companies making LLMs.
Okay, the let’s destroy the humans running the companies making LLMs before they destroy us. Fetch the guillotines!
That’s what I’m sayin’!!!
guns dont kill people. people do.
technically, it’s the hardware that helps humans destroy the planet. and that hardware is astoundingly inefficient in what they’re trying to do with it. if you need to stack a literal data center with GPUs - maybe you need to develop some new tech.
But the LLM and the hardware is not making the decision and approving anything. It’s the humans.
humans destroy the planet with gear. that’s what i meant. and it’s the humans who think they can build superintelligent AI with tech and gear so woefully unfit for that it is not even funny.
Actually surprised how candid some of these statements are. Maybe points to more internal resistance than I would have assumed… like, they see the problem.
Their focus on threats to media companies is probably borne out of fear of litigation, so maybe they only pay a lil lip service to how they also hurt “content creators” (people).
Could also be that they know that when talking to the representatives of runaway financial automatons like multinational corporations, they have to appeal in terms the machine will understand.
Typical Wednesday.
Anyone with 2 braincells saw this from day 1. Unfortunately the timeline lined up with USAians electing a president with less than 1 braincell. So there was no one to stop them when it was time to stop them.
They destroyed the web forever for the entire world, but owned the libs for a couple years, so it’s worth it I guess.
AI is the borg.
It is inherently evil in its creation and uses.
It doesn’t have to be, but it largely is.
