ChatGPT Stole Your Work. So What Are You Going to Do?

If you've ever uploaded photos or art, written a review, "liked" content, answered a question on Reddit, contributed to open source code, or done any number of other activities online, you've done free work for tech companies, because downloading all this content from the web is how their AI systems learn about the world. Tech companies know this, but they mask your contributions to their products with technical terms like "training data," "unsupervised learning," and "data exhaust" (and, of course, impenetrable "Terms of Use" documents). In fact, much of the innovation in AI over the past few years has been in ways to use more and more of your content for free. This is true for search engines like Google, social media sites like Instagram, AI research startups like OpenAI, and many other providers of intelligent technologies. This exploitative dynamic is particularly damaging when it comes to the new wave of generative AI programs like Dall-E and ChatGPT.