Big Tech & AI: "Guilty until proven wealthy"
It's very US-centric, but then much of AI discourse is. What I like about this piece from Matt Stoller is that it gets to the heart of what's going on here: corruption.
We no longer live in a land where people are “innocent until proven guilty,” the actual rule of law as practiced is “guilty until proven wealthy.” The Supreme Court even gave Wall Street an exemption from the Constitution in securing bankers their own independent regulator, even though no one else gets a regulator free from Presidential demands. Oh, and let’s not even talk about laws that purport to constrain illegal wars or war crimes.
And this dynamic is widely understood among normal people. In a recent NBC poll, 54% of Americans agreed that “When it comes to politics and society, nothing really matters because powerful people will always do whatever they want.”
AI, as it relates to Big Tech organisations, is simply a manifestation of this. They can do whatever they like, because not only the current administration, but seemingly any US administration won't do anything about monopolies, cartels, and other illegal practices:
Not enforcing the law against the powerful is pretty much administration policy. On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced explicitly that the Department of Justice lean strongly against litigating against AI companies. “The last administration spent countless prosecutors’ hours and money and effort and resources regulating whatever they chose to regulate,” Blanche said. “I think that there are some Justice Departments that like to do that and that’s not what we’re doing.”
While there are partisan valences here, there has also been a broader elite consensus in the judiciary that trying to impose meaningful legal obligations on large technology and AI firms is ridiculous.
For example:
It’s not just that the hyperscalers are illegal monopolists, or that Sam Bankman Fried was the most important initial funder of Anthropic, or that Meta’s business was caught for mass sex trafficking of children, or that there’s a huge amount of financial chicanery involved in funding the data center buildout.
It’s much more direct; in unsealed legal documents discovered by Jason Kint in a case brought by the New York Times over copyright violations by giant AI firms, OpenAI admitted circumventing paywalls to scrape content. The company’s President Greg Brockman, when told his company had hacked the NYT to scrape the site, responded with "ah nice." And in those same documents, it came out that Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science called the training of big AI models on copyrighted content the “largest theft of labor in human history.” These actions may be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits hacking into computer systems and taking things of value. It could be a criminal violation of copyright law. But at some level, the “largest theft of labor in human history” must be against some criminal law.
Just imagine if our enforcers and judges took that rhetoric seriously. If we enforced the law against the powerful, if we stopped this theft, it would radically upend how society works. It would let us feel a sense of control once again. And yes, it’s quite possible to apply written laws. Certainly, if you could charge Aaron Swartz, a genius programmer hounded to death for accessing JSTOR articles by a prosecutor in 2013, you could charge OpenAI.
The problem of AI is a problem in a failure in the implementation of existing laws, and of political imagination. Some people simply cannot contemplate a world in which huge tech companies are brought to heel by governments for the sake of society.
There is winnowing confidence in the ability of political actors to enforce laws fairly. Again, this will be no different if we pass new laws, and evisceration of the administrative state is reflected in reduced confidence in the expertise and independence of federal enforcers. Private rights of action, which are generally disliked by politicians, are a potential path, as are state enforcers. But we need a bigger cultural and political shift, a recognition that equality before the law is a fundamentally radical project, and it’s one we must fight to achieve.
That’s a hard case to make. The rule of law when mouthed by self-satisfied liberal politicians, sounds problematic in two ways. First, arguing for the rule of law sounds like you support the unsatisfying status quo. Paradoxically, it also sounds unrealistic. The idea of using the law to put Sam Altman on trial, well, that sounds like a utopian fantasy more unrealistic than bots destroying the world.
[...]That’s not to say I would oppose new rules or regulatory agencies. It’s just that these proposals strike me as besides the point. Maybe it’s necessary to have a level of panic and new laws to spur action, but I just think it’s important to recognize that the elite consensus that rules don’t apply to the powerful simply cannot coexist with any credible attempt to make a harmful technology more safe. It is that consensus that blocks the existing rules from taking effect, and that will block any future regulation from being effective at making these technologies safe.
The most obvious example of American elite exceptionalism, of course, is the Epstein scandal, but I find that so heinous that I don't even want to sully my digital garden by talking about it.
Source: BIG by Matt Stoller
Image: CC BY Alan Warbuton