SUNDAY SCROLL: A.I. Should Be Making Creators Billionaires...So, Why Isn't It?
Something new to read, watch, look at, listen to and do to #bemorehuman
This is a long(ish) one so I’ll skip the preamble and simply wish you a superb Sunday, Nx
Read this…
If data, meaning authors’ words, photographers’ images, programmers’ code and, yes, even your social posts and holiday snaps, is so essential to the development of A.I., which is set to be the biggest cash cow in history, then it must be worth a ton of money, right? I mean if, as has been claimed, data is the new oil then shouldn’t it be making creators oil rich? The answers seems obvious to me and yet, as this brilliant investigation by the NYT demonstrates, big tech couldn’t care less, in fact they even try to paint the creators as selfish for holding back the future of technology in, ‘How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.’
At least two (Meta) employees raised concerns about using intellectual property and not paying authors and other artists fairly or at all, according to the recordings. One employee recounted a separate discussion about copyrighted data with senior executives including Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, and said no one in that meeting considered the ethics of using people’s creative works.
Excerpt from ‘How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I.’
I realise that the NYT is paywalled but right now it is charging just US$20 for an annual subscription - less than a cocktail in most Singapore bars for a year’s worth of quality journalism. Big tech is stealing from us and increasing inequality, supporting journalism like this is one of the very few ways we can hold them to account.
Unlike Google, Meta and Open A.I at least the IMDA of Singapore has shown local authors the common courtesy of asking to use their work before stealing it for The National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP), “a base model with regional context that can understand Singapore’s and the region’s unique linguistic characteristics and multilingual environment”. However, I’m not sure how happy they’re going to be with the answers as reported in this Straits Times article, headlined: ‘Singaporean writers object to IMDA using their works to train a large language model’.
For the record I am 100% behind developing non-anglophone, non-American A.I. but, just as we don’t need to accept their language models and data, we needn’t accept their kleptocratic attitude to copyright either.
Watch this…
I mean, don’t watch it if you don’t want to but I can’t bloody wait! Written and directed by British filmmaker Alex Garland, this film follows a pack of journalists (yay!) en route to Washington DC to cover a near-future American ‘Civil War’. You have to ask yourself it this could even have been conceived of prior to the advent of social media 🤔
Look at this…
In the marketing world where I ply my trade by day we are often exhorted to "listen to the customer", so I wanna know which customer asked for this?!?!
This, sadly, is where hyper-globalisation is headed; hiring foreign cashiers over Zoom rather than paying local workers a living wage. Not only does this undermine the local economy around these shops by making their employees and patrons poorer, it also further dehumanises both the virtual cashier and the customer by removing yet another daily human interaction that forms the fabric of a cohesive society. I know its a cliché but this is truly Black Mirror territory!
Listen to this…
In a couple of weeks I am hosting a panel discussion at Content 360 featuring, amongst others, Haresh Tilani. Haresh is co-founder of the incredibly successful YouTube Channel ‘Ministry of Funny’ and podcast ‘Yah Lah, BUT...’. He is influential but I wouldn't call him an influencer, he is a writer, director and producer of smartly crafted comedy content. We had a briefing this week and I think I got away without him realising I had never listened to his podcast...until now.
‘Yah Lah, BUT…’ features Haresh and his co-host/co-founder Terence Chia discussing topical issues with depth and nuance, well-informed by research and of consequence to Singaporeans. Sure there's banter but, having recently bemoaned the lack of non-American anglophone content in my Internet bubble, I was super happy to find this and can highly recommend the latest episode which is a response to the Straits Times article above. (I will be publishing my response next Thursday 😏).
Finally, do this…
I am on a real reading binge at the moment but in Singapore that can be an expensive habit so I was relieved to find ‘Book Sitter Club’ a brand new, second hand, pop-up book shop that is holding its first sale at Huggs Coffee shop at 30 Maxwell Road this weekend! Book are priced from S$2 - S$25 and if you want to find out where their next pop up is I strongly recommend you follow their Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/booksitterclub.sg.
Happy reading and see you Thursday 👋