Again, more of religious commentary on AI that emphasizes labor issues.

My Day One journaling app told me this morning that today marks one year since I read Cory Doctorow’s For the Win after picking it (and many other of his books) in a Humble Bundle. That means that it’s finally time to write out some thoughts that I’ve been having over the past several weeks, all centered around wanting to reread the book. I have a lot of other books on my “to read” list right now, so it’s kind of ridiculous to want to get back to this one, but there are two things that have been really pushing this idea.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

Reading all this recent coverage on Musk’s “gaming” has made me want to reread Cory Doctorow’s stories about gold farming—which is all the more fitting given that Doctorow uses gold farming to talk about exploited labor. gift link

I think this is a much bigger deal than any purported security risk.