AI companies shift the blame for data collection from them to you
Recent moves by OpenAI and Zoom shift the blame of data collection from themselves to you. The same thing happened with the blame for car accidents 100 years ago.
OpenAI today said its new web crawler, called GPTBot, can now be blocked using the old robots.txt file standard or by blocking its IP address. If website owners choose to use one of these methods, OpenAI won’t extract data from your site and bake it into ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, video conferencing giant Zoom quietly changed its Terms of Service in March saying that it reserves the right to use your data to train its AI. Zoom users agree to the Terms of Service or can’t use Zoom.
What these moves have in common is that, while they sound like protective benefits for the public, in fact they shift the burden of responsibility for data collection from the data grabber to the data owner.
The same thing happened 100 years ago with cars.
Where jaywalking laws come from
The rise of automobiles during the early 20th Century caused chaos in the streets. City streets were built for mammals — humans and horses. But especially humans. People crossed streets every which way and in any direction. Pedestrian safety was a simple matter of listening for the clop-clop-clop of slow-moving horses, and stepping out of the way.
When cars emerged in the early decades of the 20th Century, pedestrians were getting killed in growing numbers — neither drivers nor cars could predict where the other would be.
Fatal pedestrian accidents started giving cars a bad reputation as killer contraptions that really shouldn’t be on the roads. Car makers cast about for all kinds of solutions, including “pedestrian catchers” lashed to car front bumpers for snatching pedestrians up instead of mowing them down.
Then, in the 1920s, a cabal of carmakers came up with a brilliant idea: They banded together to lobby cities to pass jaywalking laws. (A jaywalker was slang for a country bumpkin — a jaybird — in the city too dumb to cross the street without getting run over.) By the early 1930s, jaywalking laws were nearly universal in American cities. They required police to cite and fine jaywalkers for crossing the street except at designated crosswalks.
The laws claimed to boost pedestrian safety. And, in fact, they did. But the larger effect was to shift the burden of pedestrian accidents from cars (and their drivers) and onto pedestrians. Before jaywalking laws, it was the car’s fault if they hit a pedestrian. Afterwards, it was the pedestrian’s fault.
Ownership of the roads was transferred to cars and drivers and from pedestrians, who were now required by law to stay off the roads, for the most part.
And that’s exactly what’s happening now in AI data collection.
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Good Ideas
QR Blend is the first AI QR code generator. It integrates images with QR codes together, and the QR code still works.
The Living Vehicle LV model is a luxury camping trailer you tow with your Tesla. The trailer has fold-out solar panels for harvesting electricity from the sun, which you can use to charge the Tesla itself. Now you can go anywhere without worrying about charging stations.
The Jobe Besk is a backpack that folds out into a desk for working anywhere.
Mylo is an underwater camera system that uses AI to detect people in your pool who may be drowning. It works 24/7 to make sure nobody drowns.
Mike’s List of Shameless Self-Promotions
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(Why Mike is always traveling.)
Love this-- a look at how even when history isn't quite repeating, it's definitely rhyming. Glad to cross digital paths and looking forward to more.