Stemming an Unspotted Stealth

80 per cent of the information in the digital universe is created by individuals through their phone calls, emails, online financial transactions, postings on social media, and audio and video recordings

- SHOVANLAL CHAKRABORTY

In the fall of 2022, Sam Altman's company, OpenAI, sprung Chat GPT4, a large language model-based AI product capable of automating 40 per cent of the white-collar jobs in the financial, legal and medical sectors, upon an unsuspecting public. Since then, large audio, video and image AI models have also been introduced into the marketplace. Little was said about how the company had obtained all of its data to train the model from millions of websites across the globe without informing or obtaining permission from the data owners, especially Wikipedia. This brazen theft of data came to light only after several well-known authors and The New York Times filed lawsuits complaining of gross copyright violations.

While Altman is being feted by the glitterati of the business and technology world for showing them ways to extract maximum value for their money-making ventures using his company's AI software, simultaneously, tens of thousands of people are also being laid off across the world because of automation.