They are stealing our stuff

10/2/26

That LLMs are trained on proprietary information isn’t news. That they are not as capable as the creators marketing departments would have you believe shouldn’t come as a surprise. Unless you explicitly turn it off (and probably even if you explicitly turn it off) the models injest all the information you give them and add it to their stores.

Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at New York University’s Courant Institute, published a bombshell statement suggesting that OpenAI had stolen other people’s work and improperly attributed it.

Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype

So this quote isn’t on its own surprising and if you want to read the statement it’s linked from the article. What makes it interesting to me is how much it reminds me of the behaviour of “the company” in Martha Wells dystopian future.

[Murderbot] was recording all their conversations all the time, […] the company would access all those recordings and data mine them for anything they could sell. No, they don’t tell people that. Yes, everyone does know it. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.

(Wells, Martha. 2017. All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries)

We are sleep walking into this and other dysfunctional futures and we really need not to be. Also that’s a really good book you should read it.

AI