Brian Eno has spent decades pushing the boundaries of music and technology, but when it comes to artificial intelligence, his biggest concern isn’t the tech — it’s who controls it.
Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.
Scraping when the scrapee suffers as a result of your scraping is good, actually.
Scraping to train machine-learning models is good, actually.
Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.
Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.
We absolutely can have the benefits of scraping without letting AI companies destroy our jobs and our privacy. We just have to stop letting them define the debate.
Well, the harvesting isn’t illegal (yet), and I think it probably shouldn’t be.
It’s scraping, and it’s hard to make that part illegal without collateral damage.
But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing about these AI fuckers.
In the words of Cory Doctorow: