BIG TECH’S BIG THEFT

THE WORLD IS GOING GAGA OVER CHATGPT, THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BASED CHATBOT DEVELOPED BY OPENAI, FOR ITS STUNNING CAPABILITIES. BUT WHAT IS THE REALITY?

There is a word that is almost used as a synonym for ‘innovation’, ever since the startup culture caught on. Yes, it is ‘disruption’ itself, and how it came to be a positive word despite its quite negative meaning is a feat that only Big Tech could manage on this planet.

It is said that angel investors and venture capitalists have made disruption an important yardstick while assessing the ‘innovative potential’ and ‘scalability’ of startups. For a startup idea to click big-time it should ideally disrupt the lives of the incumbent players and the people they employ. But of course, all for the common good.

Maximum the disruptive potential, maximum will be the scalability. The logic? It is quite simple to understand, and can be explained with two real world examples. Uber has to first disrupt the lives of millions of cab drivers across the world, so that this huge segment will have no option but to enrol for Uber. Or Oyo has to disrupt the lives of lakhs of hotels and lodges, so that they will have no option but to enlist themselves for Oyo. But all for the common good.

In olden days when more commonsense prevailed, people would have cried foul that these are nothing but the forcible creation of monopolies, and invited regulatory action. But it doesn’t happen these days, as seemingly there will be ready competitors too, though in reality there will be only one major competitor emerging - an Ola for an Uber or a Swiggy for a Zomato - which makes them powerful duopolies, but which is enough to keep regulators at bay. Again, all for the common good.

What is this kind of disruption really? It is nothing but violent theft, if not looting by broad daylight. To understand this, you should speak to the millions of cab drivers and small hotel owners who were ‘forcibly’ enrolled by these tech aggregators and later left in the lurch. One silver lining amidst this grim scenario is how more and more restaurant owners are now coming out of the shackles of the food delivery aggregators.

But all these hard facts about these disruptive tech aggregators were mentioned here to just show what poor lambs they are compared with the really Big Tech firms, which have been carrying on a grand theft at a much grander scale for decades now.

Remember the time when hundreds of thousands of text bloggers used to live off advertising programs like AdSense? But then Google introduced the innovation of showing snippets from the web pages in the search result itself, which meant that only if the snippets failed to satisfy a reader, will they need to go to a webpage. And Google continued to strengthen the snippets with more and more features, like the current almost endless Q&A style, which makes sure that no one will find any need to visit the source web pages. But remember, all for the common good.

Wikipedia is another seemingly harmless operation that has amassed other people’s content and made it their own, even while not paying a dime to the content creators. Of course, you will get a citation to your webpage if you are lucky - as per the whims and fancies of that wiki page’s editor - but which is a citation that delivers poor to no value to the content creator. But can you complain? Of course not, as it is for the common good.

Now, artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT take this kind of content theft to an unprecedented scale. ChatGPT being very efficient at understanding user queries as well as in generating answers in its own words, is leaving no trail even of its large-scale theft! High quality content creators who have painstakingly created complex and knowledge-class content are suddenly at the mercy of this AI beast. But no complaints, as it is all for our common good.

ChatGPT’s cousin in graphics and design, DALLE, by OpenAI itself, is similarly being flagged by artists and designers across the world, as their works are being taken without permission or credit and made into DALL-E’s intelligent creation.

One may ask that can’t the content creators prevent this from happening? Oh, yes, they can, but for that a content creator will have to ‘opt-out’ of all such programs one by one - from Google, from Wikipedia, from ChatGPT, from the upcoming Google Bard, and another dozen such grand theft AI schemes coming their way. By default we all have been forcibly ‘opted-in’ into these services. Big Tech reserves such big rights for themselves. All for our common good.

In case you didn’t know it yet, even before ChatGPT recently launched a professional account that costs a hefty $42 dollar a month per user, they have been valued at $29 billion dollars, which is one of the fastest accelerations in value creation ever in this planet’s history.

It is high time that ‘disruption’ is restored to its correct meaning in the English language. At least that, for our real common, collective good.

John Antony