AI is leading to a tragedy of the commons: It is overgrazing the commons, scraping up everything it can, and is also being used to pollute the commons with untrustworthy content.
@Julia You make really good points --- and we need a better metaphor than the apocryphal "tragedy of the commons". On its eugenicist origins, see:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/
@emilymbender OMG - thank you for pointing out. Good grief! But can we steal the idea back from him? It is such a good metaphor.
@Julia I think we probably need a new one --- because ordinary people working with a public good treat it as a public good. The tragedy (as you point out in your piece) has to do with profit-incentive driven big tech & billionaires...
@emilymbender I’m sure you have read Elinor Ostrom’s work on this - and how public goods are better maintained by communities of trust than by profit or legal motives.
It gives me hope, but is hard to figure out how it applies to such a global public good with so many diverse communities.
@Julia @emilymbender what those big tech companies are doing is disgusting, but I'm thinking what needs to happen is not so complicated after all: whoever makes such a system must be required to declare exactly what "training" data they use as input and if even a single one of those inputs requires attribution, like Wikipedia, then the system is obviously illegal to use.
I do realize that this is very far from what is happening now. But still. In principle the issue could be handled like that?
@eliasr @emilymbender transparency about training data would be a good start!