May 2023
Sam Altman, May 2023, sitting next to me, at the U.S. Senate: “content owners totally deserve control over [their work] and to benefit from it.”
[$400-some billion later:]
September 2025
Sam Altman, yesterday: Ha, ha kidding! Unless you opt out, it’s mine, all mine. My precious!
See also DallE3: built on 1.5 billion images already opted-out at time of training, by way of Haveibeentrained.com.
Scammy announces proprietary opt-out scheme for scraping, only to ignore it.
Then announces blackbox opt-out page to which rights holders can upload their works manually, one at a time, infuriating everyone.
Then promises copyright management system that, six months later, no resources were ever committed to according to inside sources.
And then comes Ghibli Day.
And you know the sad part here, Gary? He’s made you complicit.
Every prompted image rewards his theft.
Every published chatGPT image devalues the underlying images, as he gives them away for free. You pay him, he pays nobody.
It’s an act of normalizing what ought to be condemned and rejected.
It’s an act of economic violence against rightsholders.
Please stop.
There is a shared (degenerate) mentality with some publishers who give you, the writer, the privilege of paying (various amounts) to have one's work published, and then they keep all of the rights--unless your sales reach Stephen King numbers. I have this phrase going around in my head that says to me: "What's wrong with this picture?"
They treat writers, especially in academia (who often spend entire careers working on creative contributions), as oil and gas and chemical companies (et al) like Koch Industries, they treat the earth and its natural resources which are "just naively lying there" with rapacious glee. These people are the Jeffrey 'Epsteins of modern-day predatory capitalism.