It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If it is the future, can we go back? | Marina Hyde
TTake a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google Images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI chief smiling geekily, the unassuming lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to cover the bottom half of his face in any of these photos, and you’ll immediately notice that Sam has the sad eyes of the psychic of the missing woman’s boyfriend who the police asked to appear for a missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we are all very worried and just want you back.
If this joke seems inappropriate, crude, or manipulative – please don’t worry. I’m using OpenAI’s gold standard of rollout, where people who don’t want any content being created have to make a formal, time-consuming and bureaucratic choice outside From being used/abused/exploited in any way anyone wants. I haven’t heard anything from Sam, so I think he’s okay with me saying he knows exactly where Sheila is because he put him there. He is, after all, quickly emerging as the type that appears next to the phrase “in plain sight.”
For Sam, the past two weeks have seen the launch of the Sora 2 AI video generator – a stunning upgrade to the Sora of just 10 months ago – and his immediate descent into a sludge of copyrighted stolen goods. We’ve also seen the announcement of another network of circular deals between OpenAI and chip companies e.g Nvidia and AMD This brings the OpenAI craze The value of the deal exceeds one trillion dollars This year alone. This does not mean at all that in addition to enabling you to watch videos of meticulously created characters being animated by pixels by fanatical, talentless losers, OpenAI will also enable you to lose your house in a financial collapse if the bubble bursts too hard.
And look, no offense to the “creators” of Sora. I often walk into art galleries and realize that the things on the walls would be so much better if I simply stole them and painted funny dicks or something on them, and that they wouldn’t have made them publicly displayable if they didn’t want to. Moreover, none of the tech giants have a cultural life, so they can’t imagine what could be so creatively valuable that you wouldn’t want a robot to desecrate it for money. If you’ve seen Sam’s frequent reading recommendations, you’ll know that they’re literally the “Business Philosophy” section of a second-rate airport bookstore. Mainly this week, he wanted us to know that Sora 2 was great and fun. “Seeing a feed full of memes about yourself is less weird than I thought it would be.” Sam posted reassuringly. So everything is fine! However, I think it pays to be one of the most powerful people in the world and make untold billions off of this stuff, and not just have revenge porn in a Byzantine simulation because somehow historical claims seem to be the case. confused “The handrail.”
I’ve seen people say that OpenAI’s motto should be “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” but that seems unreasonably comforting. Her actual motto seems to be “We’ll do what we want and you’ll let us, bitch.” Let us consider Altman’s recent political journey here. “For anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s,” Sam warned in 2016“It’s scary to watch Trump in action.” He seems to have gotten over this in time to attend Donald Trump’s second inaugurationPerhaps because – if we were to extend his non-technical and predictable analogy – he is now one of the industrialists welcomed into the Chancellery to distribute the spoils. “Thank you for being a pro-business, pro-innovation president,” Sam told Trump at a recent White House dinner for tech giants. “It’s a very refreshing change.” Inevitably, the Trump administration will refuse to introduce any regulation of AI at all.
Meanwhile, please remember what Sam and his ridiculous geeks said earlier this year, when it was suggested that Chinese chatbot DeepSeek may have been trained on some OpenAI work. “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share the information as we learn more,” his company’s angry statement read. “We are taking aggressive and proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.” Funnily enough, it seems that the last entity on Earth with the ability to combat AI theft is OpenAI.
It was left to Hollywood talent agencies this week to extract some kind of pause from Altman, who… I spread some flannel About trying to channel, if not hard money, then certainly “a new kind of engagement” toward those he publicly described as “rights holders.” Many of us remember a time – about 15 minutes ago – when rights holders meant just that People who own rights. I mean, the proof is in the Word. But Sam is post-rights. The question is: If he has post-creative rights, can we honestly believe that he does not effectively enjoy other kinds of rights?
OpenAI wants what all beloved platforms ultimately want: that their users never have to leave their borders. It’s clearly moving towards being seen as the new default homepage of the web, as Meta once did. Could this intimate privacy horror show/election distortion scandal/child abuse crisis be far behind?
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Because, incredibly, we have already been through this life cycle. But we’d do it again, wouldn’t we? Or more accurately, given the unprecedented speed at which SAM is moving, we already are He owns I did it again. We first praised some mysterious tech Pied Piper as someone brilliant and unorthodox, then we belatedly realized that he was not what he seemed and that his technology was more dangerous than he imagined, then he still failed to regulate, and now we have fallen victim to it. In more ways than one, this is just a terrible version of the AI movie we’ve already seen. If Altman models can learn, why can’t we?
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Marina Hyde is a columnist for The Guardian
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General at Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
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