"(W)hat we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein
@dangillmor maybe our future will include the necessary return of oral histories and passing on knowledge directly one to one in training and teaching.
@cobalt @dangillmor Or you could just use Wikipedia or host whatever information you want on your own site.
People pretend like these companies hold some magical power, but the only power they truly have is that people choose to use their services, and that can always change.
@LouisIngenthron The power asymmetry doesn't go away because you self-host, they can scrape your site too.
@clacke @dangillmor @cobalt Hate to tell you this, but so can anyone who hears your verbal story. There's no DRM around a campfire.
@LouisIngenthron @clacke @dangillmor @cobalt To be accurate, your analogy would have to have a slave owned from birth to death by a King, sitting at every campfire, and giving back nothing to any community.
Really, to compare an individual listening to another individual around a campfire to a huge machine sucking in billions of documents is just a false comparison entirely.
@TomSwirly If you read up, you may notice it's not a comparison I initiated.
Moreover, you seem to have missed the point. It's not the listening at issue, but the reproduction. Oral historians plied their trade by listening *and then repeating* the stories of others, often for profit.
@LouisIngenthron People listened to other people, one at a time, for their personal advancement.
This has little relevance to an owned machine sucking up all of human knowledge for the benefit of a large company.