Why I refuse to use “AI”, and why you should boycott it too.

I refuse to use “AI”, and you should boycott it too. It is an evil technology entirely based on theft, with massive ethical, legal, societal, environmental, and financial problems. This thread explains why. 🧵

The training data for these language models is entirely based on stolen data. Art, books, code, knowledge – all stolen from their authors without their knowledge or consent. It is the largest theft of intellectual property in history.

‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

Unlike a human training by studying existing media, AI models simply copy vast swatches of copyrighted material into themselves, and can even be tuned to regurgitate those works verbatim.

Nav Toor (@heynavtoor) on X

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now.

Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible.

Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it.

They fine tuned…

Major AI companies have trained their models by feeding them vast swathes of pirated books. While they were eventually taken to court over this criminal act, they got off with a mere payout, while keeping the models trained on this stolen data.

AI Firm To Pay $1.5 Billion For Pirated Books, Keeps Its Trained Models

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to settle a major copyright case over pirated training data—but the company gets to keep its Claude models intact. No deletion. No rollback.

They then moved to training models using old physical books, with AI companies buying second-hand books en mass (including very rare books), scanning them, and then destroying the originals.

Rare Books: Why AI Scans and Destroys Them

AI companies buy rare books in bulk, scan them with machines that cut the spine, then destroy the original: a judge ruled the practice legal as fair use.

Models for image generation were trained on hundreds of millions of stolen images which were scraped from the internet, again without the artists’ knowledge or consent.

Midjourney Founder Admits to Using a ‘Hundred Million’ Images Without Consent

It has outraged artists and photographers.

Models and agents for programming are also based on plagiarism, with training largely taken from public source code repositories, including ones under copyright (or copyleft.) Again, code authors never consented to this usage, and many repos predate LLMs.

GitHub’s Commercial AI Tool Was Built From Open Source Code

Copilot is pitched as a helpful aid to developers. But some programmers object to the blind copying of blocks of code used to train the algorithm.

More general models, such as those used by chat agents, were largely trained on data stolen from forums, social media, articles, and wikis – once again without the authors’ consent.

Every Prompt You’ve Ever Typed May Be Training an AI Model — Without Your Consent

In 2020, OpenAI released GPT-3. To train it, they used a dataset called The Pile — a massive corpus…

While I’ve singled out specific examples in this thread, ALL major AI models (including OpenAI / ChatGTP, Anthropic / Claude, Microsoft / CoPilot, and Amazon, to name a few) have been trained in this way, on human-made data taken without the permission or consent of the authors.

If you are a creative and you are considering using AI, remember that it is a technology that is designed around stealing the work of other people just like you.

There are also a lot of unresolved legal issues around the use of generative AI. Anything made using it may be at risk of legal action in the future, once the laws finally catch up with the technology.

The main legal defence from AI companies is the claim that training AI models on copyrighted material counts as “fair use”, which is not proven law at all, with some courts already ruling that it is not (at least in certain circumstances.)

Court Finds That Using Copyrighted Material as AI Training Data Is Not Fair Use

A US appeals court upheld a ruling that AI legal research company Ross Intelligence’s training of its AI model didn’t amount to “fair use.”