The internet has long operated according to an unwritten bargain. People make their content available to search engines and in exchange, search engines drive users back to the sites where that content resides. That agreement has been upended by AI programs like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. There’s a new bargain: Giant banks of computers inhale your content and use it to train their own systems to answer anything on their own sites. They suck up everything and you get played for a sucker. Soon, everything ever shared on the web will been sucked dry. But that’s not enough for the arms race taking place among deep-pocketed mega-companies looking to absorb the necessary amount of data to be crowned AI’s ultimate know it all. To really scale, these tools need to move beyond the internet. “The race to lead A.I. has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times. At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said.” NYT (Gift Article): How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. As these companies break every rule of data collection, they’re simultaneously trying to convince you that they can self-regulate. There’s a sucker born every minute.