A business that cannot operate without breaking the law is a criminal organisation and should be treated as such.
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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apple: we can't make money without an overpriced ecosystem
Lemmy: we can't make money lol
criminalize wage theft
More than a year after leaving my job, I got a letter from them... and I initially thought it was some kind of scam. Why would I think that? Well, because it was a check for about $1k. They had apparently miscalculated overtime/differentials during the height of the pandemic (when I worked myself to the bones in an indescribable, fearful/stressful environment), so they owed money to almost everyone who worked during that time.
~$1k for just me. It was a hospital. In a capital city of the US. I don't even have an estimate of how many of us hourly's were working then... RN's, RT's, CNA's, LPN's, PT, OT, Security, Housekeeping? Let's just imagine an extremely low number of employees for the hospital, like 500.
If $1k was held for 500 employees over a year, you're telling me they got to profit/sit on $500,000 for over a year? What's the interest on that? And I'm low-balling this number to a huge extent.
It's like, "Whoopsies, we didn't pay y'all enough at the time, but it's cool because we recouped most the loss anyway over the past year". They hedged their profits by stealing wages is how it seems to me. "Oopsie daisy, we had an error; But don't worry cause here's your pay a year later". Cool cool cool, no worries friend. Didn't need it anyway
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This notion that big companies have is just ludicrous. They come up with whatever business model that obviously cannot work in the long run but then see it as their right that society make it work for them.
Oh, and put OpenAI on the slave labor list as well
OOTL, why should OpenAI be on the slave labor list?
Oh crap.
There's been recruitment here in the Philippines for similar AI training tasks with very little pay, too. But that thing in Kenya is much much worse.
I took on a music-related task out of curiosity and I got these recruitment emails after
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The pay and the TASK, holy fuck, being exposed to images and content that most people can't take in even small doses, and with NO therapy options. Horrible.
Is sampling and analyzing publicly available data and not storing it considered stealing?
I'm not defending anyone here, but that's just weird. It's also weird to take a meme seriously, but w/e.
Public data still have licenses. Eg, some open source licences force you to open source the software you created using them, something OpenAI doesn't do.
If you're using it as you found it, then yeah. But if I take derived data from it like word count and word frequency, it's not exactly the same thing and we call that statistics. Now if I draw associations of how often certain words appear together, and then compound that with millions of other sources to create a map of related words and concepts, I'm no longer using the data as you described because I'm doing something entirely different with it. What LLMs do is generates new information from its underlying sources.
In my example, they would still be using the source code to create new software that is not open source, not matter how many Markov chains are behind it.
That's really stretching it, tbh. You're arguing that the cake is made of chicken because it contained whole eggs at some point.
It has to be stored in some form for the AI to "learn" from and remember it, and a lot of the debate is around whether AI is actually able to learn, or if it can only really blindly combine 1:1 copies of elements into something derivative.
There's also the debate of whether what humans learn and produce based on influence can be compared to AI, but humans aren't able to consume millions of records in seconds like AI.
They're not storing the original data and OpenAI even state so themselves. LLMs compound derived associations between words and concepts from whatever it analyzes, which is further modified by all the other sources it analyzes and that's what gets stored during training. It doesn't matter if it's a few sources or a million sources, it's not storing any of it as-is. It's very much like how we process information ourselves for the length of our entire lives by making generalizations. We don't memorize everything precisely besides the foundational blocks of language, but our neurons do fire in a certain pattern when given a trigger. How is that stealing?
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You can't use someone's work for whatever you want just because it's publicly accessible.
Hasn't web scraping been done for like forever, though? How is this any different? You get publicly accessible information and you derive data from it. You're literally not stealing anything or storing it as-is.
I'm actually still not sure how I feel about this.
I can use books to learn a new language. AI can use texts to learn their kind of language in a sense.
I'm not sure where the limit is or should be though.
I don't think that's really the same thing. Most people learning another language aren't doing it specifically so they can turn around and sell translations to millions of customers.
And if they were, they'd probably need to be accredited and licensed, using standardized sources that they pay for, directly or indirectly.
so they can turn around and sell translations to millions of customers
That sounds like a translator to me. And also, they're kind of doing it for free. What they're selling is access to their latest models, their API and their plugins store. They're not exactly selling the information that has been transformed.
All companies: We can’t make money unless we make you subscribe to everything.
Only if they're black.
The Nextdoor posts about shoplifting and executing thieves is fucking bananas. And the stories they always share are always black folk.
Fortunately, nextdoor is a Karen cesspool and I'd rather keep them contained there.
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Don't forget about Meta somehow committing mass copyright infringement of books but playing the 'information should be free but only for this specific instance of rocketing our AI training' bullshit.
User shared their Netflix password with a friend, RIGHT TO JAIL!
Have copyrighted music play when your phone rings while streaming? Believe it or not...jail.
Delivery guy catches a moment of a pay per view you bought, also jail
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The secret ingredient is ~~crime~~ legislative, judicial, and regulatory capture.
Enemies inside the gates.
Open AI uses mechanical Turk, which is the closest you can get to slave labor while still technically paying somebody, except for prison labor I guess.
Yup...I've had the displeasure of being on that thing for a few months some years back. I couldn't shrug the feeling of feeling like a sweatshop worker. "Ah yes, do these menial tasks that'll take you 40 minutes of your time to earn...5 cents! woo!"
I always assumed that shit only made sense if you were living in a place with very low cost of living when paid in US dollars.
It doesn't pay nearly enough as a good source of income.
There's a very stingy and narrow set of requirements you have to meet before you see or even do dollar-amount tasks.
If you're docked by a single 'Requester' aka your micro-bosses on there, then your chances slip.
So, I can't recommend Amazon Machine Turk to anyone. Only do it for beer money. Don't do it for a living income.
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