I wish people running OpenAI and similar companies read Do Things That Don’t Scale and took it seriously. With the amount of money at their disposal, they could honestly license their training data and not engage in piracy. Unfortunately, they preferred to do things that do scale (scrape & steal), in the hopes that if they do as much as possible as sneakily and quickly as possible they’ll get away with it, and the question about paying people who are unwitting ghost content producers for their commercial software would never come up until it’s too late.
Sure—just as polluting the environment and our bodies with toxic waste has to do with not spending money they don’t need to spend.
Fully free market cannot sustainably exist in presence of bad faith actors. Capitalism does not imply that every company must be a bad faith actor, but many companies, including in this context particularly OpenAI, Microsoft et al., are such actors. This scenario is exactly where the regulation is supposed to come in.
