Wasting Time: How Corporations Mastered the Science of Exploiting Creatives

Wasting Time: How Corporations Mastered the Science of Exploiting Creatives

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NOTE: Since this story was written, its central claim—that corporations use the legal system as a way to drag out their exploitation of creatives—has been greatly strengthened by an interview former Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave in front of students at Stanford. Alex Heath of The Verge directs readers to this GitHub site that has the full transcript of the interview. (Unsurprisingly, the video has been taken down.) Schmidt had this advice for students:

If TikTok is banned, here's what I propose each and every one of you do:

Say to your LLM the following: Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines.

That's the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

Later, Schmidt added:

So in the example that I gave of the TikTok competitor, and by the way, I was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music. What you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be, is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right? But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.

And do not quote me.

To which Stanford digital economics Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, who was interviewing Schmidt, asked the former Google CEO whether he realized he was on camera.

This rare deviation from the cyberlibertarian/copyleft/free culture/open source script of talking points, which aim to convince elected officials and the public that using artists’ works to train AI without each artist's consent and without crediting and compensating them is “not stealing,” should serve as a wake-up call for government officials worldwide who are failing in their duty to protect the works and livelihoods of artists and other copyright owners from AI companies’ massive global IP heist. In a world in which corporations know they can make huge profits by breaking laws for which victims must sue them in order to attain justice–a process that corporations know they can afford and which they do their utmost to delay or to ensure takes years and years, during which said corporations can more than recoup any eventual fines or payments–governments need to step up and protect artists and other copyright owners from generative AI companies' IP theft yesterday.

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Today I’m thinking about the lack of discussion (outside of artists’ circles) about the impact that exploitative generative AI is having on some artists’ mental health, as well as about Nikola Tesla, Philo Taylor Farnsworth, David Golumbia, and Bob Marley.

As American Songwriter’s Jim Beviglia notes,“Redemption Song,” which (unlike Marley’s usual reggae) was written in the folk genre as the musician succumbed to cancer and which was his last recording, is viewed by many as that legendary artist’s final message to the world. In it, Marley wrote:

How long shall they kill our prophets

while we stand aside and look?

Ooh, some say it’s just a part of it.

We’ve got to fulfill the book.

Won’t you help to sing

these songs of freedom?

This Bob Marley & the Wailers’ song describes an artist enduring persecution but eventually triumphing over it. It also has special significance for me since it was one of the first songs I ever performed with friends as part of a band. So it’s no surprise that I often think of it when I contemplate the struggles of modern-day artists who are fighting exploitation at the hands of tech corporations. I also think of other creatives—namely, inventors like Tesla and Farnsworth—who were exploited by more powerful and monied interests.

Tesla and Farnsworth were highly creative minds who, like today’s artists, were exploited by tech magnates. Both men, like most artists, were better at creating or inventing than at business management: a common trait that has always made artists vulnerable to exploitation. Science journalist Maggie Ryan Sandford notes that, unlike Edison, who (similar to prompt engineers) relied on trial and error, Tesla (much like composers and other professional artists) “was an emotionally driven dreamer with years of engineering training, which allowed him to work out theories before physically implementing them.” Tesla claims that Edison promised to pay him $50,000 if he could create an alternating current (AC) system that would be better at delivering electricity to the masses than the direct current (DC) system Edison favored. According to Tesla, when he succeeded, Edison’s xenophobic excuse for not paying up was that Tesla had misunderstood American humor—that the bet had been a joke. Later, Tesla was robbed through apparent collusion between the US government and proud fascist and Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, the latter of whom, according to PBS, used his “family connections [and father’s wealth]” to build his company and eventually garner investments and support from American tech magnates Edison and Andrew Carnegie, after which “the U.S. Patent Office suddenly and surprisingly reversed its previous decisions and gave Marconi a patent for the invention of radio. . . . [for] reasons [that] have never been fully explained” (emphasis added). Laughably, when Marconi attempted to sue the US government for patent infringement during World War I, it “upheld patent 645,576, thus restoring Tesla (who had died a few months earlier) as the inventor of the radio.” The relatively hapless Tesla was robbed yet again when he was (in this writer’s view) manipulated by George Westinghouse, a magnate he believed would not swindle him, to give up royalties in his AC patents in order to save Westinghouse’s company from Edison’s litigation.

Nikola Tesla is now widely understood to have been plagued by obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD, a condition that both fueled his drive and perfectionism but also caused him significant suffering. A fellow obsessive and visionary creator who is rarely credited as but was the true inventor of the television, Philo T. Farnsworth, suffered a similar fate. Farnsworth was driven to “drink and depression” by his wealthy and monopolistic competitor’s bullying tactics, which entailed forcing the much less financially successful inventor to defend his patents in court for years: a tactic MIT Technology Review’s Evan I. Schwartz notes Radio Corporation of America (RCA) chairman David Sarnoff—a man Schwartz and Sarnoff Corporations’ Director of Communications Thomas Lento aptly liken to Bill Gates—utilized against “those who had developed key radio inventions but had refused to cooperate fully with RCA.” (This should sound eerily familiar to artists fighting tech corporations that insist they have the right to use our copyrighted works to create technologies that are designed to push us out of our markets and that, if we disagree, the only venue through which we can fight them is the courts—a fight that will, we are continuously told, take years and years. It should also sound familiar to artists who have heard generative AI users who champion these exploitative products rationalize their morally bankrupt behavior with the excuse that they are “waiting for the courts to decide” as though the law and morality have, historically, always aligned.)

Crucially, the fact that patents for inventions are much more time limited than those for copyrights—that patent protections lasted only 17 years during Philo T. Farnsworth’s lifetime—further facilitated Farnsworth’s downfall. Schwartz writes, “Farnsworth’s key patents expired in 1947, just a few months before TV began a sudden, rapid proliferation from just 6,000 sets in use nationwide to tens of millions by the mid-1950s. RCA captured nearly 80 percent of the market, while Farnsworth was forced to sell the assets of his company . . .” Moreover, Farnsworth “wasn’t the only casualty of Sarnoff’s delay tactics”(emphasis added). In a modern parallel, artists fighting against exploitation from generative AI companies—artists like Karla Ortiz—have spoken out about such attempts to delay justice for artists so that tech corporations’ exploitation of us can be normalized. The UK’s former Prime Minister William E. Gladstone’s astute observation that “justice delayed is justice denied” continues to ring true.

This points to an inconvenient truth for those who would like to diminish creators’ rights: The time afforded to copyright owners under the current copyright system is one of the few real protections independent artists have against corporate infringers who use delay to game the legal system (most notably, generative AI companies). It’s no wonder that, having witnessed the reality that court battles are often eventually “won” by those with the resources and time to see them through and not necessarily based on what is just, moral, or even legal—champions of exploitative generative AI prefer to compel artists to fight what the average human being knows is unjust and dislikes in court, all while they work fervently to normalize IP theft and crusade to shorten the length of copyright protection.

One wonders whether Farnsworth and his estate would have been better able to reap the benefits of his lifelong labor had he had protections similar to those afforded to today’s copyright holders. Instead, like Tesla, Farnsworth suffered nervous breakdowns due to the extreme stress of fighting against his financial exploitation and died poor while those who had robbed him led affluent lives and were widely celebrated for their “achievements,” including work they had stolen from others.

David Golumbia

More modern champions against corporate exploitation include the late English Professor David Golumbia, who should be revered by artists worldwide. Golumbia was among the first to dissect cyberlibertarianism, which, according to Golumbia, is “a term scholars and journalists have developed to understand [the phenomenon of advocating for] . . . absolute internet freedom because it is ‘freedom of speech’” and which “points [to an extent] to the widespread presence of overt libertarian politics in digital culture,” but is, essentially, “at its narrowest core, the belief that digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of democratic governments.” Golumbia notes this is also known as “digital technology or internet exceptionalism” or, to be more blunt, “[the sentiment that] the internet is a place to which the law does not apply”—a belief that undergirds and drives the open source and free culture movements, as well as copyleft groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons, which have fought for decades to diminish or do away with artists’ copyrights. The performative rhetoric of “democratization”(while behaving in anti-democratic ways, such as restricting the ability to “exercise choice in other realms [outside of markets]” and being rooted in a fundamental belief that “the greatest tool to produce freedom in our time . . . requires us to abandon all non-market forms of political power”) is a hallmark, Golumbia notes, of cyberlibertarianism.

In his critique, Golumbia calls out “overt right-wing figures like Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk” and “those with nominally left-of-center leanings like Clay Shirky [and] Cory Doctorow” (the latter of whom, despite being celebrated as a libertarian by libertarians and working for an organization, EFF, that was founded by and serves the interests of libertarians, seems to carefully avoid identifying himself as a libertarian/cyberlibertarian and to even distance himself from that label). Golumbia also calls out the right-wing character of the cypherpunk movement and its adherents, which includes people like “Murray Rothbard, David Friedman (the further right) son of Milton Friedman) . . . Patri Friedman (the further right) son of David Friedman), and [radical libertarian and fascist] Hans Herman Hoppe,” who pretend, in public, to be politically “neutral.” Indeed, much like being closeted about one’s use of generative AI is popular among those who would like to identify as artists but are deeply dependent on generative AI, being closeted about one’s libertarianism is the norm amongst cyberlibertarians.

This secrecy seems to stem from a libertarian shift to influencing western politics from behind the scenes through the kind of social engineering that notorious libertarians like the Koch brothers have perfected. Sam Altman’s conviction that “a big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try” is worth considering here. To date, Altman appears to have done just this by taking a page out of the Bill Gates-David Sarnoff monopolist playbook and investing in tangentially related industries, such as technologies that are important to the government and critical to national defense and surveillance (including nuclear power and drones) and platforms like Reddit and Change.org, spaces the public and activists might naturally turn to in order to express dissent or protest: all of which enables him to spread his influence and exercise control over critics. More on the libertarian “nesting dolls or shells” approach below.

Golumbia observes that the cyberlibertarian platform is “absurd and self-contradictory” because it alternates between “the view that governments are unable to use law to regulate digital technology and the view that governments must not be allowed to use law to regulate it.” He sums up the problems with cyberlibertarianism as being:

. . . most pointed in the way that it pulls many who would declare themselves outright opponents of right-wing politics, in general, and political libertarianism, specifically, to champion individual rights and economic freedom; advocate for markets as the solution to all social problems; fight government regulation; and to defend (too often without realizing it) the rights of companies like Google to do exactly as they wish while causes like public education, civil rights, labor conditions, the social safety net, and, especially, proper regulation of business get either stalled or pushed aside entirely.

Moreover, borrowing from Philip Mirowski’s observation that “the [neoliberal] political right operates through a series of Russian dolls or shells that do not necessarily coordinate with each other and may not even be fully aware of each other,” Golumbia notes:

Cyberlibertarianism can be understood as a less explicit outer shell of neoliberalism or even a number of nesting shells. Rather than call themselves cyberlibertarians, its proponents tend to rally around specific, evocative terms like ‘free and open,’ ‘internet freedom,’ ‘copyright monopolies,’ and more (emphasis added).

Sound familiar?

Golumbia’s article “Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left” is a must read, his April 2022 lecture at boundary 2's Anniversary Conference at Dartmouth College is a must watch, and his magnum opus Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology should be released posthumously in November 2024. Preorder this book (from the University of Minnesota Press and not Amazon) now.

Tech journalist and author Paris Marx notes that although Golumbia, who recently died of cancer, was respected by his community of peers, “there were also others in the academy (and beyond) who . . . tried to stifle his work.” Golumbia’s observations about the lengths to which cyberlibertarians go to preserve right-wing ideas of “freedom,” such as by supporting crypto as a way for people to send money to Russia while it is at war with Ukraine and dismissing (as Golumbia claims Cory Doctorow has done) genuine concerns grounded in real-world abuses of technologies by pedophiles, terrorists, and other criminals as merely tropes (popularly known among cyberlibertarians as “the four horsemen of the infopocalypse”) and, therefore, lies, strikes me as prescient. To be fair, I do not think governments should have unimpeded access to private data and I agree with Doctorow that encryption benefits all of us. However, there must be limits to privacy, especially when we need to protect our most vulnerable populations. I also find it frustrating that Doctorow, the EFF, and other cyberlibertarians are, like right-wingers who hate contraceptives, fighting against commonsense preventative measures—namely, requiring that data sets used to train AI use licensed data—which would drastically cut down on AI-generated child pornography. After all, it is the United States government’s reticence to regulate the inputs of generative AI training data—to take obvious preventative measures—that has facilitated the rampant proliferation of AI-generated child pornography and/or child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

However, here is cause for hope. And here and, to an extent (though this is likely, as with certain AI companies “begging” for regulation, merely an attempt by corporations to engage in regulatory capture and position themselves to be the authors of the laws by which they must abide) here, too. It seems it may be more difficult to repeat the patterns of exploitation we find in stories like Tesla’s and Farnsworth’s, as well as in the stories of countless Black musicians of yore who were exploited by white media magnates and white artists, on a large scale that negatively impacts vast swathes of populations, especially when, as a recent survey by UpWork’s Research Institute of “1,250 C-suite executives, 625 full-time, salaried employees, and 625 freelancers” in “the US, UK, Australia, and Canada” revealed, more than 75% of workers report that generative AI has “decreased their productivity and added to their workload[s]”—when most people just don’t want what exploitative AI companies are selling (emphasis added).

Lessons/Onward

The little bit of digging below the surface I have been engaged in lately has taught me that whenever true threats to monied interests emerge, these voices are often neutralized in the cruelest ways: through oppressive tactics that significantly degrade the quality of life of those crucial voices to such an extent that our world eventually loses out on ingenuity and the never-made work these authentic creatives could have contributed to societal progress had their foci been unimpeded by drawn-out and/or unchecked corporate exploitation.

The private suffering of creatives who endure exploitation and then persecution for daring to be outspoken and to stand up for themselves or against other related injustices but who must put on placid, brave faces in public in order to advance their causes—to be taken seriously by a world in which confidence is valued more than competence (See Katie Notopoulos’ disappointingly gushy “OpenAI's Sam Altman is the ultimate 'personality hire.' The [AI] industry is full of them.”)—points to a larger reality best captured by the Black Lives Matter movement. Due to extreme socioeconomic power imbalances, such as those between artists and tech corporations, hierarchical leadership of causes in which one is very much the underdog is no longer viable. Much like activists working for racial justice discovered and recounted in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, even philanthropic institutions, such as “social justice oriented” arts funders, that should be supporting artists in the fight against corporate exploitation via generative AI are eerily quiet because they are, like academic researchers, investors, and elected officials, too embroiled/entangled in sprawling webs of conflicts of interest due to their having received funding from these same exploitative corporations, their leaders, or their investors. The reach of cyberlibertarian social engineering, backed by corporate war chests, is vast.

Therefore, among artists and allies, everyone must lead. We must all call out the seedy underbelly of the copyleft, open source, and free culture movement(s) that was exposed by Golumbia, Neil Turkewitz, Paris Marx, and a few others. Using every possible legal avenue and not just the platforms that are owned by corporations that are opposed to our values and interests, we must all fight against governmental collusion with corporations that exploit artists and the public. We can and should take our fight to town halls and demand that candidates for public office explain where they stand on the issue of generative AI companies using artists’ copyrighted works without our consent and without crediting and compensating us in order to train AI models. We should also take to the streets (like the Animation Guild and other unions have done), write op-eds, use our artistic prowess, etc. Everyone must lead because it is only through the sheer force of our numbers and our collective voice that we will overwhelm tech corporations’ dollars (much of which, again, is actually money that was, essentially, stolen from us) and drown out the constant deluge of deception, hypocrisy, and lies that corporations and their beneficiaries (in academia, the fintech venture capitalist industry, government, and elsewhere) rain down on the public and, through intense lobbying, on ever-calculating elected officials.

What I’ve learned so far about the cyberlibertarian underpinnings of the copyleft, open source, and free culture movement(s) deeply troubles me—so much so that I’ve spent much more time than usual researching this topic and realized there is still much more to unearth and that I need to devote significantly more time to learning about the various ways in which corporations have historically and in recent times exploited creatives. I hope you'll join me. Because I’ll be more focused on reading than writing, I’ll be (aside from another piece that is nearly complete) writing far fewer long-form articles in the coming months and will, only when I believe it is truly necessary, share information in a shorter format.

More to come.