The sad state of Generative AI

I haven’t been commenting news about the recent events about Generative AI developments and exploitation by the industry, the political scenario for over one month, and in Donal Trump 2.0 era it is quite a long time. Some recent news pushed me to get back to this topic: it’s nothing really new, and honestly this could be a full-time job, but it’s really worth reminding, here and there. Moreover, it seems that some warnings that might have looked like old time marxist positions forcefully brought forward in time, back to the present, to cite Robert Zemekis, are instead to be taken very seriously and not disregarded as they have been so far.

Let’s start with OpenAI’s recent cry for more latitude in their operations to preserve the supposed lead in the AI race against China. Basically, they are saying:

• if we take the position that training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use we are basically out of the game;
• even though we might respect this ruling, there are bad boys out there that will not, and they’re foreigners;
• anyway, we have a lot of mechanisms in action that will prevent our chatbots to basically spit out copyrighted material in the original form. Trust us on that, and be flexible on how to judge if we are right. Even better, let us decide.

If you want to know more about fair use, or if you know about it but you want to understand if generative AI qualifies for fair use read what the sadly deceased Suchir Balaji thought about GenAI and fair use.

OpenAI is not alone in this crusade against copyright rules that favor content creators and intellectual property owners. Google recently joined them, and I suspect that most big tech companies are completely aligned with them.

Amazon, for instance, is making a very clear and bold move: Echo devices were (to some extent) able to process Alexa requests locally, and avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. It looks like this will no longer be the case as of March 28.

I don’t have an Echo device, I never wanted something constantly listening to me all the time as a primary function (remember, it has been proven that if you’re not careful your mobile phone can surely do that as well). If you think that Amazon was surely looking at all the generated results of the local processing, and that it does not seem a huge change, maybe you’re right. But Amazon does have a track record for mismanaging Alexa’s voice recordings, and deepfake frauds are becoming easier to perform every day, and you might want to minimize your voice and video recordings widely available in the dark (or, what, white?) web.

I think this scenario is the best possible advertisement for a book titled The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff.

It is really a massive book, and certainly not even an easy read. Mainly it is not easy due to its message, because it is scrubbing in our faces an unpleasant truth: the optimism of the Internet’s early days was naivete, and it is always bitter to realize that you were naive.

Quoting Shoshana Zuboff:

“Surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift towards democratic de-consolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies,” - The new tech totalitarianism by John Gray

It is also pretty disturbing that the just started second Donald Trump’s administration includes someone like Elon Musk, that seems to me to be evoked by Shoshana Zuboff’s words, as well as fitting the Spider Man’s meme.

Consider, for instance, that he’s the owner of an automotive company, very much involved autonomous driving, and now he’s in the position to influence the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration… it is not exactly reassuring, considering data reported by George Mason’s University Professor Missy Cumminngs, showing that self-driving technology is far from safe as of this moment.

Just as OpenAI’s and Google’s arguments serve as perfect marketing for Shoshana Zuboff’s book, Trump’s administration itself is a stark reminder that the concerns raised in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are not some outdated Marxist ghost from the past. They are terrifyingly real—and possibly even worse than the book’s most pessimistic readers anticipated.