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OpenAI announces plan to leech profit from its customers’ work

OpenAI

OpenAI has been exposed as the grift its billionaire creators built it to be, with its business model brought into the spotlight on X. An account revealed that the AI’s creators steal real user data, use it to train new models, and have announced new plans to profit from the very discoveries their own customers make.

Oh, the irony. A billionaire-owned AI company depends on and profits from human intelligence and now wants to draw a profit from the very people who made it smart.

The post in full reads:

found a company called OpenAI
> a non profit to benefit all of humanity without the need to make shareholders happy
> steals all data on the Internet, violating millions of IP rights
> uses data to train models
> offers models in the API
> users pay for responses to create new stuff based on their own ideas and input
> OpenAI: not making enough money, we want mooore! but trust us, we will be responsible with AGI and do everything for the mission
> stealing literally infinite money from the non-profit by removing 100x return profit caps for investors and ask for government bailouts for datacenter build out in case it goes bad
> still not enough …
> demand share of everything users built and already paid for

AGI: Artificial general intelligence

Like the ultra-rich who call themselves ‘wealth creators’, OpenAI’s creators want to market themselves as ‘idea creators’. Such humility has come to be expected from the world’s richest. In turn, the shareholders cash in on the AGI-assisted ideas if those users build profitable ventures. Yet another case of the super-rich freeloading on the knowledge and labor of the people who created their fortune in the first place.

This presents as another example proving the world is rigged to make life easy for the richest in our societies. Clearly the modern AI-world will just exacerbate their lazy and exploitative practices.

However, others have stated this isn’t quite as ‘sinister’ as it seems:

This X account attempted to correct the record, saying:

Here’s what’s actually going on: OpenAI will approach enterprise customers and offer them to sign a deal that will include a revenue share with OpenAI from products made with the aid of OpenAI’s models. It’s up to the enterprise customer – a sophisticated party, represented by competent outside counsel – to agree or disagree to pursue this arrangement.

Nevertheless, even without calling it “forced,” this still isn’t a win for humanity or for workers.

OpenAI — Billionaires want us not to think for ourselves

This controversy highlights a very real issue our human race is hurtling towards, ramped up by billionaires’ megabucks.  Society has seen a growing comfort with offloading decision making and idea creation onto AGI. More and more have looked to AI for legal letters, research and idea suggestions. However, technology innovation is arguably reducing our own sense of intelligence and imagination.

The working class have always held onto our sense of pride in the work we do to support our families. OpenAI doing ‘our thinking’ for us is not the win for humanity some purport it to be. In practice, it will only work to take that sense of pride, purpose and fulfilment away. Individual intelligence and lived experiences underpin entrepreneurial innovation, empowering problems and needs to be approached from distinct and varied perspectives.

True success comes from hard work and original thought — not from mindless ideas that prop up the status quo and train workers to stop thinking.

We cannot play into the hands of billionaires who have their boots on our necks.

Featured image via This Is Money

By Maddison Wheeldon

This post was originally published on Canary.