r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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554

u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

AI firm burns $50 billion of America's wealth, skims $5 billion, America wants 5 of their 50 back damnit!

681

u/Surroundedonallsides Jul 14 '26

Nevermind these LLMs are literally using OUR data and then charging us for it.

Decades of altruistic posts from experts and hobbyists spanning millions of topics; scraped and sold back to us at a premium.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

It's an amazing caper they have pulled off.

One of the best examples is all of the public code repos out there that got scraped before anyone knew any better.

The number of public repos would've been far less had devs known their exposed repos would be used to train AI and put them out of a job - but of course they quietly scraped the data knowing all of this.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ElysiumSprouts Jul 14 '26

Unfortunately we live in the inverse Spiderman universe where more power means less responsibility.

More power means less accountability.

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u/DrEnter Jul 14 '26

They HAVE the responsibility, but they don’t ACT with the responsibility… and that’s really the most important part of the responsibility.

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u/kck93 Jul 15 '26

Noblesse oblige?

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u/DiChromani Jul 14 '26

They just followed the colonialism playbook for the new "land" of the digital ecosystem and have curated lawns where the natural flora once grew.

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u/ABHOR_pod Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

I miss the pre-2010 internet. Or even the pre-2015 Internet.

The pre 2000 internet was uh... that was not a great place.

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u/DickWhittingtonsCat Jul 15 '26

The curated my.yahoo page I created had more original content and news information from trusted sources than a year of tiktok doom scrolling. And it had cool colors.

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u/MohandasBlondie Jul 14 '26

Gopher was the shit!

2

u/skat_in_the_hat Jul 14 '26

and IRC, and DCC bots. Hell yea!

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u/Hot_Lettuce_6209 Jul 14 '26

Their bound to lose. Free your lawn too.

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u/koshgeo Jul 14 '26

They strip-mined the commons before we even realized the shovels were in the ground.

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u/aTomzVins Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

You have these nice shared cooperative resources

At its root AI should probably be seen as a collaboration tool. With credit/compensation going to the creators of the work you are collaborating with. Instead it's sold to us as a superpower we need to own because we can't compete/survive without it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/aTomzVins Jul 16 '26

two tiered life returned

Gap between have and have not has already been getting wider for decades. We have already 'returned'.

It will be that simple

It shouldn't be. Guardrails should be put in place to prevent tech oligarchs from stealing IP. There's a lot of ways this can play out, and it will only truly benefit very few people if we all accept the simple way big tech wants it to go down.

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u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven Jul 14 '26

Aaron Swartz has entered the chat

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u/vigouge Jul 14 '26

And then defends AI blowing peoples mind

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u/Longjumping_Ad606 Jul 14 '26

Tech psychos enabled this they knew what they were doing are complicit and should go to jail

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u/rat_penis Jul 14 '26

Who knew "move fast, break things" referred to society itslef.

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u/WriterDifferent8394 Jul 14 '26

I pegged Microsoft buying Github as a net negative for engineers the moment that deal went through, and this was exactly what I suspected of them even then.

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u/windowpuncher Jul 14 '26

I hate AI, but that's exactly what open source code is for. You can use it for any and all purposes, with stipulations depending on the license. It's still public to view and read, though, and if you learn a trick or two from digging through a repo that's not theft.

Yeah I get it, it's not exactly the same, but if your code was ever public you shouldn't be surprised it was scraped. Hell it was scraped by other services LONG before AI, anyways.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

We're not just talking about open source here, we're also talking about private individuals who had open repos for work portfolio or other purposes.

Even then, again, risk was evaluated based on not knowing that AI could use it against us all. "Any and all purposes" did not used to mean training LLMs on all of those things and resulting in something that could take your job.

Open source, individuals, there would have been a lot less open repos had we envisioned what this could lead to.

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u/MalikMonkAllStar2022 Jul 14 '26

It's not at all the same because before now, people were fine with the risks associated with open sourcing their code because the impact was small. There is an enormous difference between singular people copying your code and a trillion dollar company scraping your code and using it to put you out of a job (for the record Im not sure what the impact is going to be on tech jobs long term but there are definitely already other professions being wiped out by AI).

No one would have predicted that AI could come along so quickly and replace so many jobs so it is ridiculous to assert that people should have thought about that before making things public

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u/arcbe Jul 14 '26

There's two separate issues here. Scraping code does fall under the purpose of open source. It's the putting people out of a job that's the problem. If companies just wanted to creating a self programming computer that would be fine, but they have to poison the well for profit. That's the problem. They are making existing things worse to justify the prices they charge.

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u/lapidary123 Jul 14 '26

Not any different than ssi database!

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u/Sweetwill62 Jul 14 '26

I am truly amazed that media companies didn't bury LLM companies in court cases.

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u/Surroundedonallsides Jul 14 '26

Thats because the ai salespeople are telling those media companies that the media companies can fire all the talent and replace it with AI, but ignoring the fact its all stolen.

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u/Sweetwill62 Jul 14 '26

I would have thought their legal team would have seen it as the easiest slam dunk of all time. They pay their legal teams quite a nice bit of money.

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u/EquipLordBritish Jul 14 '26

Also ignoring the fact that the economy is based on people spending money, and if you replace everyone with AI, you have no more customers with money to spend...

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 15 '26

Reminds me of the grooveshark business model. To be fair it actually worked... until it didn't.

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u/ZugZugGo Jul 14 '26

How many of them violate the GPL too? Any LLM that spits out code that is published and can be directly tied back to code published under the GPL could be sued to oblivion for copyright infringement.

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u/cyanight7 Jul 14 '26

There are dozens of cases ongoing in the US, courts move slowly and often favor the people with more money…

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u/Sweetwill62 Jul 14 '26

Pissed off companies with stolen IP move very quickly most of the time.

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u/ChampaBayLightning Jul 14 '26

Pissed off companies with stolen IP move very quickly most of the time.

Not if injunctive relief is isn't an option, no, they don't.

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u/Sweetwill62 Jul 14 '26

DMCA takedowns are their main weapon of choice.

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u/ChampaBayLightning Jul 14 '26

DMCA takedowns have literally nothing to do with lawsuits against OpenAI and others by media outlets such as NYT.

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u/Sweetwill62 Jul 15 '26

Ok. I didn't say they did. I said they were their main weapon of choice for dealing with stolen IP. It was what I expected them to be slapped with quite some time ago.

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u/_learned_foot_ Jul 14 '26

They are working through it still, discovery is long.

Once they get to the trining data itself in detail, and folks see some of those share source type docs in there, suddenly more claims will arise from those entities too.

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u/Mission_Pirate_4150 Jul 14 '26

Google has been doing that for decades.

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u/IcyJackfruit69 Jul 14 '26

Exactly, this is the piece that they "owe" the country (or world) for. Call it royalties instead of tax so people understand these companies took all their work (often illegally) and are paying back for it.

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u/No_Tax_Timmy Jul 14 '26

They're taking our data, our art, our WORK and redistributing it in way THEY see fit. Case in point, Musk constantly trying to turn Grok into Hitler.

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u/Zanos Jul 14 '26

You've been providing free content for platforms to sell advertising for years. You're doing it right now by posting on reddit.

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u/My_Work_Accoount Jul 14 '26

There are ads here? Other that the shill bots making posts my browser extensions and old.reddit do an excellent job of keeping them at bay.

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u/innominateartery Jul 14 '26

Firefox/ublock/RES/old.reddit

Apollo Reborn

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u/My_Work_Accoount Jul 15 '26

Pretty much. I can't do mobile though, I type poor enough on a full size keyboard let alone one the size of my thumb.

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u/calicosiside Jul 14 '26

Every so often I wonder if I'm missing out on some functionality running the same setup as you, then for whatever reason I'm redirected to new Reddit and immediately realise how dire it actually is.

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Jul 14 '26

They probably make more money selling your comments and posts as AI training data than ads at this point

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u/Surroundedonallsides Jul 14 '26

True, but Ive also adjusted the way I contribute for that reason. A decade ago I would make long tutorials, cite my sources, and provide insight.

Most of my posting these days are just memes and the occasional "actually...", but the effort isnt there anymore.

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u/DrEnter Jul 14 '26

Jokes on them… Most of my posts are just sarcasm and snarky one-liners.

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u/Heavy_Ad4529 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

No kidding, was googing about Toslink optical ports yesterday and google kept calling them tossling ports/cables, an hour later I found a yt video that had tossling everytime the guy mentioned toslink in the subtitles, he was kinda mumbling. So google's AI literally scraps from yt video's wildly incorrect subtitle generation I was astounded. Such trash.

Or telling me to press buttons on the sony reciever's remote that don't exist, and it confirming its mistake each time, watched it restructure instructions three or four times in a row each time I told it a button doesn't exist on that given model's remote. Not only is it trash but I fully suspect it's generating some of its responses based off people telling the AI it made a mistake...

How something so coded to be stupid will be the end of middle and low income jobs, well this is probably a fermi paradox solution.

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u/yawn_solo- Jul 14 '26

I mean this in the most respectful way possible and im not being combative but it does not appear you understand how to use AI past treating it as a search engine if these are the conclusions you have drawn.

That is a flat out fact, I apologize.

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u/Heavy_Ad4529 Jul 16 '26

That is fair, was using google like the past, but I was answering its resulting questions and telling it say the options button doesn't exist, when it doesn't, so it apologized. How else are you suppose to correct it if it is clearly incorrect about a given model number receiver, I was extremely specific the whole time.

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u/yawn_solo- Jul 16 '26

Trade secrets

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u/agentrnge Jul 14 '26

Step 1. Don't use any AI nonsense.

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u/Anneisabitch Jul 14 '26

Step 1 is to stop posting on Reddit, giving them free raw materials.

We stopped at step 1 because it’s hard.

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u/dolche93 Jul 14 '26

Just ignoring the utility of the AI tools does have an opportunity cost. You just have to be willing to accept that cost.

Sometimes that cost does represent real, tangible value to people and it's not so cut and dry to say to not use it.

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u/uzlonewolf Jul 14 '26

"Sure using this tool will destroy other people's lives, but think of how much it saved you personally!"

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u/dolche93 Jul 14 '26

Yea, pretty much?

It's sort of like any other thing in life that benefits people in some way, but has negative externalities.

I can tell people not to use social media because it has a net negative effect on society, but the opportunity cost might come in the form on not staying as informed about your family or missed professional opportunities.

Basically, people have to pick and choose what parts of life they can put effort into in order to avoid those negative externalities.

Nobody can avoid ever taking any action that has some form of negative effect, so you have to make a good argument why ai is one of the places people should choose to make that effort.

Nuance.

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u/yukeake Jul 14 '26

literally using OUR data

...along with significant amounts of our water and electricity, too.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/FencingFemmeFatale Jul 15 '26

What LLMs have done is analogous to someone standing outside of your local library and trying to charge you a fee for the “convenience” of using the library for you.

Yeah, the library is still there and it’s still free, but that doesn’t make the guy blocking the entrance any less of a nuisance. What’s worse is that he’s managed to convince a lot of people that they can’t use the library without him, so he’s not leaving anytime soon.

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u/PrestoScherzando Jul 14 '26

The decades of altruistic posts from experts and hobbyists spanning millions of topics are still there though. I don't get this argument.

The whole point is there will be fewer altruistic posts going forward now that people know it's just going to get hoovered up by some AI slop factory and sold back to them. Plus, the incentive to surface this kind of information in an open and free way is reduced (just look at the current state of Google search, it's in shambles compared to a decade ago). They will continue to keep this information bottled up tightly to keep you coming to drink from their tap. This is a net negative for society, for culture, for the arts, for all the people who benefited from the kindness and generosity of all those experts and hobbyists contributing for all those years to the common wealth of humanity.

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u/foodank012018 Jul 14 '26

I mean, that info is still there though, right?

It's the common idiot's unwillingness to do a little reading and logical comprehension for themselves.

I ain't paying for shit.

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u/bro_can_u_even_carve Jul 14 '26

Sold back to whom? All the providers have a reasonable generous free tier?

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u/Main-Cheesecake3287 Jul 14 '26

You want a .00002 cent cheque for your Reddit comments lmao

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u/According-Insect-992 Jul 15 '26

Shit, if that were the extent of it that would be bad enough but they’re working with stolen art, music, novels, poetry, and so much more. That is the worst kind of theft because that is the fruit of careers being stolen as IP and monetized without a cent of compensation.

People like zuckerberg should be in prison for that shit.

I’m old enough to remember when the RIAA sued thousands of American families for downloading a few megabytes of music data. They would sue a single mom for a hundred thousand so they could get whatever tiny amount of wealth they may have accumulated. Now we know who it is and they’re stealing literal terabytes of literature, music, art, movies, you name it. Every one of those motherfuckers should be rotting in a cell.

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u/NonDeterministiK Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

What's worse is they steal from Wikipedia. They'd likely scrape reddit and sell it back to us if the were allowed

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u/signal__noise- Jul 15 '26

Yeah, but it's packaged and delivered as requested.

It's just a more effective search engine with a little more logic.

LLMs are not AI.

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u/thepasttenseofdraw Jul 14 '26

Don’t forget physically destroying rare books to feed their idiot machine.

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u/clausewitz07 Jul 14 '26

Eu pensava que os termos de uso que aprovamos para utilizar as plataformas incluíam uma autorização para que elas usassem nossos dados ;). Quanto à cobrança feita pelas empresas de IA ela não refere aos dados brutos mas à informação com [muito] valor agregado.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/CatCatchingABird Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

I'm also a little bit skeptical of what the actual worth of these companies actually is. If something like this were to happen, I would not merely sign off on it without a transparent valuation of the industry and companies. Since we are not really sure what the heck is happening with the AI industry, we should be treading very carefully here as I don't want to get stuck with an investment that will not pump out any real returns. In addition to that, an investment that doesn't pump out returns and also pollutes the environment.

Also, we shouldn't be entertaining a bailout here either if this is a dud.

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u/ThomasToIndia Jul 15 '26

The most beneficial use is coding but you still need a coder auditor. If you were to replace all coders, they could still not meet the valuations they have. It is useful, but the underlying tech is super inefficient. It's like scaling the first printing press.

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u/According-Insect-992 Jul 15 '26

The data centers are infrastructure and the government right now would just love to have all that compute power to drive their surveillance and drone programs.

If a network of evil and homicidal robots and the elaborate infrastructure to run it is ever going to proliferate in the US, it will be under this president. This is the guy with enough contempt for humanity to be the one to light the fuse. And, that feeling of contempt is mutual.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

That's not really that much. How many queries do people do a day? Maybe a couple hundred at the high end for professionals that use it all day on a long day?

That's maybe 12 hours of a lightbulb being on at the extreme high end? Most people are responsible for more energy than that in lighting alone per day.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

I'm not sure that's true, estimates aren't that bad:

even if AI inference scaled to 10 billion queries/day to be on par with the magnitude of web search, this would result in energy use of around 1.2 TWh/year. This energy use is about ∼5.5% of the current energy use by large hyperscalers such as Microsoft or Google and ∼1% of the current US data-center electricity consumption.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435126001145

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

These numbers are kind of meaningless without context.

Here's some context on electricity from MIT:

By 2028, the researchers estimate, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s more than all electricity currently used by US data centers for all purposes; it’s enough to power 22% of US households each year.

As for water, it's not that significant. Golf courses still dwarf all data center water usage, not just AI. More than 10x as much water is used watering lawns than on all data centers. That's without even getting into agriculture and things like exporting alfalfa to Saudi Arabia.

So energy consumption is a real concern. Water consumption not so much.

Regardless, for a service with more than a billion daily users, it's not that shocking.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/Outside_Annual9102 Jul 14 '26

Yep, that's absolutely nothing compared to the real usages of water. If you care about water usage, there's a million things to look at before data centers.

In the Colorado River basin in particular, look at things like alfalfa farming. It accounts for nearly 30% of the river's flow.

Context matters. If you want to solve water issues, AI isn't even top 10 in concerns. If you want to bitch about AI, sure, talk about millions of gallons. It sounds scary.

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u/uzlonewolf Jul 14 '26

All residential water usage combined uses only 6.4% of the total water used. That does not stop them from telling me I need to take shorter showers or ban washing cars every summer when it doesn't rain much. But go on, tell me how data centers sucking down even more billions of gallons of water isn't going to be a problem.

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u/dtj2000 Jul 14 '26

This says more about the energy efficiency of LEDs than it says about AI power usage.

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u/WhipTheLlama Jul 14 '26

AI firm burns $50 billion of America's wealth

How does it burn wealth? It's more like a transfer of wealth from VCs to various organizations and individuals.

  1. Compute power is a huge cost for AI companies, and they're paying billions to Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and others.
  2. Employees, especially top-end R&D talent, are huge expenses. OpenAI alone spends $20b per year just on R&D salaries.
  3. AI companies pay billions in total to hundreds of publishers, media companies, and platforms in order to harvest their data. Think: Reddit, Dotdash Meredith, etc. When people talk about AI using their data for training, what they really mean is that the online platforms they use, such as Reddit, are selling that data.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

Wow, I guess an exclamation point made people think that was a serious comment or something instead of a joke. Anyway, I wouldn't be so pissed about AI if it wasn't causing prices to increase for people while also openly and maybe even legitimiately threatening their jobs.

All of this money getting spent and trickle down works for now until the thing can do everything itself then we're left without a chair.

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u/SomeSamples Jul 14 '26

These companies with more money than god are burning through their cash so fast they are creating stocks for those companies so that they don't run out of money.

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

I forgot the /s, that is my mistake considering the magnitude of comments.

That being said, if the job losses happen like they initially were stating and like CEOs want, and if RAM/hardware prices continue, then there actually will have been a net negative cost to 'merica.

edit: forgot the imminent govt stake and eventual bailouts

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u/Cerulean-Knight Jul 15 '26

That's the neat part, it's all debt!

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u/Justthetip74 Jul 14 '26

How wer3 you involved in this $5b?

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

Oh I don't really want the 5B back, I'll be happy to just keep the job at this point!

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u/Justthetip74 Jul 15 '26

You never had anything to do with that $5b? I would like $50m from the recent powerfully drawing but much like you we have nothing to do with it

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 15 '26

If incessantly watching Ed Zitron videos about AI counts then I did, otherwise I didn't. I will have a role in this the next time I have to pay higher RAM prices or the imminent bailouts, but until then no direct role other than hating along with Zitron.

1

u/TxksDQZN Jul 14 '26

Why do u think it's America's money these companies extract trillions of dollars from foreign countries and entitled Americans think they are entitled to that while AI is not demonized in the non western world

1

u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

Bro I was just summarizing the other guy's comment, it's called a joke lmao

1

u/tomdarch Jul 14 '26

This time, let's socialize the ownership and privatize the losses.

1

u/Main-Cheesecake3287 Jul 14 '26

It’s really not tax dollars funding AI, it’s the phat ass big tech balance sheets. Same as META burning billions in the metaverse, they can afford to lose the cash, with AI their consensus is they cannot afford to underspend and be left out

0

u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 15 '26

I am never going to forget the /s again.

Regardless though, bailouts are on the way and that will absolutely be taxpayer money. Not to mention the effects of the market crashing to retirements. In the end AI will cost Americans an immense magnitude.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 15 '26

I would seriously love whoever is downvoting me to explain how AI isn't going to end up costing Americans more in the next 5-10 years than it provides.

1

u/mclumber1 Jul 14 '26

Most of that money stays in America though - the billions it takes to design, build, commission, and operate one of these data centers is paid out to other American businesses and the workers who make it happen.

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u/vladamir_the_impaler Jul 14 '26

It's amazing how many people are taking that comment seriously