I have a friend – a cherished friend, of some twenty years’ acquaintance – who’s building things on top of ChatGPT, and guilelessly enthusiastic about the prospect, and has just in general decided to be completely cheerleadery and uncritical about this class of technologies. And I don’t know how to tell him that I think they represent the enclosure of the commons, and a theft from those of us who generated the corpus – accumulation by dispossession happening before our eyes, in real time.
So should we put some kind of magic moratorium on ML research for a few months as some technologists have self-servingly suggested? No, that's just silly. What we need to do is recognize these risks and face them directly."