Journalist sues OpenAI over misuse of work, personal data
“It is my work, my intellectual property, my personal data. Not his. I didn’t give permission to use that.” Carole Cadwalladr is holding OpenAI’s Sam Altman accountable, suing him.
She announced that Thursday in her second TED Talk. An eventful, tough, but also inspiring talk. When the journalist was on that same stage in 2019, it was because of her revelations surrounding Cambridge Analytica. In stories for the Observer and Guardian newspapers, she revealed, the data company had substantially influenced both the Brexit campaign as well as Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Social media insights were used to widely polarise populations.
“What we see happening in the world now is exactly Putin’s playbook: allegiance in exchange for protection. This is moving toward autocracy, a form of power we have never experienced before.”
Alegiance to who? Top executives of Amazon, Google, Meta, X, OpenAI and all the other US agencies that capture consumer data on a massive scale.
Cadwalladr said: “The entire business model of Silicon Valley is surveillance… We are already living in the architecture of totalitarianism.”
She added that any form of resistance is valid: “Give money to The Way Back Machine. They preserve what is discarded daily from the Internet. History is the best way to escape totalitarianism, because history shows the techniques you have to do that. How we can disobey. Don’t issue cookies, don’t use your real name online, use Signal and don’t bomb Yemen. Privacy is power. You lose if you don’t fight.”
Cadwalladr concluded her talk with a case study. She showed how ChatGPT wrote a TED Talk speech in the style of Carole Cadwalladr with a story that could be hers.
“It’s frighteningly plausible,” said Cadwalladr. “I’m going to sue Sam Altman because that text is not his. ChatGPT was trained on my IP, my work, my personal data and I didn’t give permission there.”
Altman was on the same stage a day after Cadwalladr to give a TED Talk.
“My newspaper, The Guardian, has signed a syndication deal with OpenAI. I see it as the newspaper has entered into a marriage with its own rapist. I do not approve of that.”
She concluded: “What happens in my industry also happens in yours. Data rights are human rights, but the tech bosses don’t care. They think they are protected because they are colluding with an autocrat. But that’s not how history works. Just think of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They lump in with the tyrant who destroys laws that make their business possible.”
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