The Meta-Ai Theft: Another Reason To Hate Mark Zuckerberg

In this article, it is revealed that Mark Zuckerberg stole a massive amount of books to train his AI-development. No consent, no compensation.

I hate this man with a passion and have from the first time I became aware of his putrid existence back in about 2006 or so. I reluctantly joined the facebook bandwagon before quitting and deleting my account in about 2015-16 (a few months before Trumps first election, just before he was nominated but after announcing) It was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life and spared me a lot of brain-numbing arguments.

Lesser-known is the planned-but-abandoned animation i did in 2010 portraying Mark Zuckerberg as an evil robot octopus (I got the visuals done but couldn’t find anyone reliable to do the music). I did do an earlier animation based off the facebook experience in about 2009 called $hitfacedbook.

But anyway, getting that off my chest. I thought I might profer some friendly advice to any jittery content-creators as the looming AI-era forces us to all once again reassess the value and privacy-guards around our work.

Let’s all step back to some basic truths.

• As soon as something is published online, and rendered in digital form, its very widely exposed to theft.

  You might as well leave your wallet outside on your welcome mat before your front door every night, and then ask your chosen God(s) nicely for it not to be stolen.

• privacy guards and paywalls have gotten better but they aren’t impregnable by a long way.

• As a consequence, and I’m not much different as an artist, we all have to reassess the monetary value we put to our work. Most artists, musicians etc seemingly have given up the fight by this point and accepted that if it’s online, its as good as free and in the public domain, and they must find some other way to make money. Any payment you incur from the work as a product in itself is akin to a donation of kindness. Which feels quite deflating as an individual. If I have a car that someone wants to buy off me they have to ask me. Any physical object that is on my property or is my property has to be acquired from me by offering financial terms, and then hoping I accept them. If it’s taken without my consent then it is theft. An all I may have done was buy a $5 tin of tuna (make that $7, $8… hard to keep up with aussie foodflation). But y own work that I made with hours and hours of toil? Pfft! What’s that really worth?! Is it even worth anything at all??! Are you worth anything?! Ya precious loser…

Material published online is emphemeral, not material. It essentially can only really be called “intellectual” property. But not all property has to be physical to be legitimate and not everything that is exchanged for money in this world (bought/sold/hired/rented/subcontracted etc) is physical. Services are a good example. There are people who make a living off consulting, so giving personal advice for a fee. Teachers make money by selling you what they know and you dont, along with the skill of educating you in this knowledge they have.

But, if you have put hours and hours into a product, in this case a book you wrote yourself, which could be called a painting or film in purely word-form, then you have the right to ascribe a monetary value to it and ask the world to respect that.

Some online theives will steal your work, adjust it slightly, and then claim its an entirely different work and thus not theft. That’s a dodgy shitty trick, though plagiarists have always been around in some way. You just have to hope you have friends online looking out for you. There’s also the reality that the “individual creative” is a fairly new phenomenon historically, borne into existence out of the priveleges of legally-enforceable copyright laws… and those copyright laws have expanded well beyond their original intention. So Disney stuff from decades ago is still copyrighted. Tech companies have proprietary screws, and any industrially made product from computers to cars have components that were previously modular and cheaply replaceable with aftermarket parts now having serialised and computer-chipped parts that you have to go to an authorized dealer to repair… thus you don’t even own the stuff you own anymore, even if you bought it outright with your own money.

Its sick, its disgusting. Its an evil alliance of corporate greed and government powerlust, but ultimately I refuse to allow it to prevent me from doing what I want. (i’m gonna draw and paint anyway).

So what are you at the end of the day? An “original idea” generator? I do paintings, my paintings are originals. In theory they could be copied, but I figure good luck getting it spot-on down to the last thickness of the last brushstroke. There’s strands of my own hair that have accidentally been lodegd into a paint layer on occassion and dried permanently in the film. Can an AI robot copy that?

And what kind of insecure loser-nerd (we know what kind, his name is Mark Zuckerberg) would devote that much effort to trying to copy something I did to that degree? In effect they would have to clone me. And for what good end is that? To clone me would be to produce another rebel who wants to tear them down. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery I suppose.

The best response would be revenge: Someone copies and steals all of Meta, and offers anything they sell (be it to the public, to private data-snoops or to government agencies) at a discounted rate. Steal Mark Zuckerbergs product and undercut him. See how he likes it.

Alright, get cracking AI-developers, I’ve given you your hot idea.