With the world changing at a frightening pace, look at what is happening now…
July 25 (King World News) – Gerald Celente: Generative AI systems that “create” conversations, blog posts, articles, images, video, music etc. all have one thing in common.
They would be useless without having been trained on vast quantities of human creative content and knowledge.
A new report co-authored by leading tech industry outlet Wired magazine and Proof News has now blown the lid off how every major AI tech company illegally plundered YouTube videos to train their AI systems.
At this point, it’s inarguable: generative AI exists and has use because of vast amounts of data tech giants stole from collective humanity.
Our data, whether via social media posts, niche websites, videos, podcasts, and any internet / digital interaction in which our data could be collected by these companies, has likely either been exploited, or is destined to be.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that generative AI was born, and continues to develop off the rotten fruit of its central, ongoing and necessary sin: human creative content and data theft / exploitation.
This festering calamity will only grow, as AI accelerates in rendering human workers obsolete.
Companies across the board—not just in the tech industry—are aggressively implementing what they euphemistically call AI enhanced worker productivity gains.
But make no mistake—human workforces are shrinking at companies as AI takes hold, and the work of three humans can be done by one AI enhanced human worker.
Here’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink speaking at a World Economic Forum (WEF) session, signaling both the controlled demographic implosion of western countries, and the next level assault underway via AI obsolescence:
“If you forecast out the transformation that we’re going to see across all societies because of AI, robotics, sensor technology, the speed at which this change is going to occur…I could argue in the developed countries, the big winners are going to be countries that have shrinking populations. That’s something that most people never talked about. You know, we always used to think shrinking population is a cause for negative growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large developed countries that have xenophobic immigration policies…that don’t allow anybody to come in, shrinking demographics…these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology, and if the promise…I didn’t say it’s gonna happen, but at the promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will, we’ll be able to elevate the standard of living of countries, the standard of living of individuals, even with shrinking populations.
“And so, the paradigm of negative population growth is going to be changing, and the social problems that one will have in substituting humans for machines is going to be far easier in those countries that have declining populations.”
Fink’s comments manage to connect the dots between the AI everywhere agenda, and Degrowth, which The Trends Journal has been forecasting for years as a primary objective of technocratic elites.
Ultimately the Degrowth that has Fink and others salivating isn’t the degrowth of wealth or power per se, but the degrowth of average human populations, leaving a smaller residue of humans to supposedly benefit from the wonders of an obviously transhuman age.
And one of the ironies, of course, is that the productive fruits of many millions of that average natural humanity is being used to spur on the decimation, and the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of the few, who wish to position themselves as we have called the “Obsolescent Gods” of the future.
The YouTube Plunder, Courtesy of an “Idealistic” Non-Profit
The new expose by Wired and Proof News revealed that world-leading tech companies including Apple, Nvidia, and Salesforce have been using YouTube videos to train their AI systems in ways that violate the IP rights of human creatives, and the explicit terms of YouTube itself.
Datasets from YouTube videos were compiled by a company called EleutherAI, and then used by AI tech companies who contracted with the dataset provider.
According to Proof News, the range of content included everything from news organizations to entertainment channels, to general knowledge content providers, to popular YouTube stars and influencers:
Khan Academy, MIT, and Harvard. The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC also had their videos used to train AI, as did “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
Proof News also found material from YouTube megastars, including MrBeast (289 million subscribers, two videos taken for training), Marques Brownlee (19 million subscribers, seven videos taken), Jacksepticeye (nearly 31 million subscribers, 377 videos taken), and PewDiePie (111 million subscribers, 337 videos taken).
(“Apple, Nvidia, Anthropic Used Thousands of Swiped YouTube Videos to Train AI,” 16 Jul 2024.)
Proof News said they created a tool that aided in tracing content from YouTube channels and accounts that ended up in EleutherAI’s datasets packaged for use for tech companies.
The fact that EleutherAI has a “non-profit” status and is one-step removed from companies making use of the lifted data was something that made it easier for tech companies to use the data, while avoiding direct, dirty hands in the scheme.
EleutherAI did not reply to requests for comment about Proof’s conclusions, the article noted, including inquiries about content creator claims that video, audio and transcripts were utilized without authorization.
EleutherAI bills itself on its website as a egalitarian non profit:
Founded in July 2020 by Connor Leahy, Sid Black, and Leo Gao, EleutherAI has grown from a Discord server for talking about GPT‑3 to a leading non-profit research institute focused on large-scale artificial intelligence research. Our work has historically focused on providing access to cutting‑edge AI technologies by training and releasing models, and promoting open science norms in Natural Language Processing. As public access to large-scale pre‑trained AI models has substantially improved, our focus is shifting to researching AI interpretability and alignment.
EleutherAI operates primarily through our public Discord server, where we discuss research in the field and coordinate our projects. We embrace an open and collaborative research model, and our discord server does not strongly differentiate between employees, volunteers, and collaborators at other institutions. However, our community specifically caters to researchers and research-level discussion, and we ask that people interested in learning about AI research primarily observe.
EleutherAI employs two dozen full and part‑time research staff, who work alongside a dozen or so regular volunteers and external collaborators.
Co-founder Conor Leahy’s X feed has a pinned post where he voices his apprehension about the threats of fast-evolving AI:
Connor Leahy
@NPCollapse
·
Oct 13, 2023
If we build machines that are more capable than all humans, then the future will belong to them, not to us.
Everything else derives from this simple observation.
Thank you
@cambridgeunion
for inviting me to make the case that “This House Believes AI Is An Existential Threat.”
But if that’s the case, then EleutherAI is doing its part not only to train those AI systems, but has been ripping off human content creators to do it.
One of the company’s main stated objectives is to provide AI developers with “access to cutting-edge AI technologies by training and releasing models.”
The Wired / Proof story quoted multiple human content creators who expressed dismay at the theft and use of their IP.
David Pakman, producer of the left-leaning David Pakman Show, commented: “This is my livelihood, and I put time, resources, money, and staff time into creating this content. There’s really no shortage of work.”
“It’s theft,” added Dave Wiskus, the CEO of Nebula, a streaming service owned partly by a group of human creatives that had their work stolen from YouTube to train AI, via the EleutherAI datasets.
AI Costing Jobs, Hogging Energy and Empowering GovTech Oligarchy
Along with this latest scandal involving the core deceit at the heart of generative AI, news of other deleterious effects of AI continue to mount.
At this point, a growing number of MSM outlets are now more prominently considering what we have long forecast in these pages: that AI isn’t like any previous revolutionary technology, creating vast numbers of new human occupations, though decimating some jobs and legacy industries.
Combined with fast developing robotics and other technologies, AI adds up to massive permanent human worker obsolescence, and deleterious impacts such as skills and mental atrophy most still haven’t fathomed.
As a Forbes headline contemplated this past week: “How AI And Robot Job Displacements Could Lead Us Down The Road Of Universal Basic Income And Loss Of Identity” (17 Jul 2024.)
In the U.K. and EU zone, meanwhile, outlets like The Declan Herald are saying the job losses are so potentially devastating that governments need to intervene to stop the disaster. (“AI-led job loss is real, govt must intervene,” 21 Jul 2024.)
That article cited a Periodic Labor Force Survey which estimated that AI would likely impact eight million U.K. jobs in the near to medium term, over a wide range of industries and occupations.
The survey noted that more than one in ten human jobs in the U.K. are already facing pressures of AI replacement.
The AI energy hog, meanwhile, is also forcing leading “climate crisis” advocates to suddenly dial back their disingenuous contentions that the world could just magically transition to “clean” energy sources like wind, solar and hydroelectric.
AI consumption that will eat up the entire current electric grid capacity by as early 2030, according to some estimates, suddenly has mega billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates working on plans to start building more nuclear power plants.
Along with much of our other longtime forecasting regarding the “green energy transition” fantasy, it demonstrates that there are no current magical answers when it comes to energy production, only trade-offs.
The prospect of the power and money AI is already driving to companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google and bio-pharma and genetic startups that now heavily occupy the portfolio of Bill Gates, has put them between the rock of their climate alarmism and the hard place of their AI ambitions.
No doubt nuclear energy is about to get a huge image makeover.
Should Average Humankind Be Satisfied With a UBI and Call It An Evolutionary Day?
The same technocrats who unleashed generative AI—born and sustained via the rotten fruit of comprehensive human knowledge and IP theft—fully understand all these facets of and likely outcomes of their actions.
They know the power of AI better than anyone. They now have forms of generative AI that they aren’t releasing to the public, because it is “too good.”
Microsoft / OpenAI, for instance, has AI which can match voices of humans so perfectly, that it’s deemed too likely to be abused in creating deep fake havoc if publically available.
Imagine what other advanced “private” AI might already be in use by privileged insiders of the Gov-Tech oligarchy.
It’s no accident that current human AI overlords have been looking for ways to mollify average humanity, as they further separate themselves from the average, via the vast power and wealth grab AI technology is unleashing.
The notion of an AI supported “Universal Basic Income” is becoming more widely broached, replacing former narratives that AI creates a boon of amazing new human jobs and opportunities.
Bloomberg and others reported this past week that the results of the largest ever UBI experiment—which just happened to be backed by Sam Altman’s OpenAI—has just completed and reported its results. (“UBI Study Backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman Bolsters Support for Basic Income,” 22 Jul 2024.)
The study gave 1000 dollars a month to select lower income recipients in some 150 U.S. locales, over a course of the past three years.
And yes, that timeline dates from before OpenAI unleashed their free public preview of ChatGPT3, its advanced natural language generative AI onto the world in November of 2022.
In fact the study was begun around the time we were forecasting to readers that “AI IS LEARNING YOUR JOB”.
Unsurprisingly, the study found that the “UBI” cash was mostly spent on meeting basic needs like food and shelter, car payments and medical care.
While the study claimed to show that workers did not just drop out of the workforce due to the UBI payments, the notion that 1000 dollars could sustain that, is absurd.
The study did show that people receiving the UBI money pared their work hours, compared to the general populace that did not receive the extra money.
The larger implications of the study by “OpenResearch”—funded by OpenAI—is that sooner or later, AI advancement will necessitate some form of support to those humans relegated to working obsolescence.
But why should a GovTech oligarchy that spawned a technology off massive human IP and data theft, and which accelerates the power of elites while destroying the middle and working classes of humanity, get to control the purse strings of AI?
That’s the question they don’t want people asking.
One Technology to Democratize and Govern Another?
There are other answers besides accepting a human existence on a GovTech dole, with all the disempowerment and inevitable pressures to reduce average human perpetuation that will come with that system as a feature, not a flaw.
In that regard, we have long forecast the possibility that decentralized crypto technology could enable much wider human input in the governance of AI development, and in a fairer distribution of the profits of AI, robotics and other technologies, via DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) governance models.
We have also pointed out that smart contracting and other decentralized crypto network and token distribution technologies could take the rewards from AI productivity out of the hands of GovTech oligarchs, issuing profits directly to humans, without the manipulations and power abuses of middle players.
The labor, knowledge, content and data of all humans have been at the core of what now exists as generative AI technology.
OpenAI / Microsoft, Google, Amazon / Anthropic, Meta, X and certainly DARPA and governments, should not be ceded as the “owners” of AI.
The ramifications of that paradigm would be catastrophic for the continuance of natural humanity, as we have long forecast and outlined, given the premises, ideologies and ambitions of these entities.
The whole of humanity needs as wide a say in, and as wide and fair a distribution of the profits from AI, as technologically and socially possible.
Right now, crypto technology contains the best promise to do that.
And the reasons go well beyond economic and financial justice.
A cabal of AI developers and overseers, whether power hungry, reckless Sam Altman, or the political suppression masters at Google and Meta, or the weapons and surveillance developers of DARPA (and their counterparts in China, Russia and the EU, etc.) are already amply showing they will use AI, and technology more generally for dystopian purposes long contemplated by philosophers and sci-fi visionaries.
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