I Am Time Magazine's Person of the Year

"For the past two years, my colleague Alex Reisner has investigated precisely how tech companies use massive data sets to train their LLMs. He has repeatedly found that so-called architects of AI have relied heavily on enormous databases of copyrighted work to create chatbots and other programs, and has also found that this work is generally taken without the consent or awareness of its creators: musicians, filmmakers, YouTubers, podcasters, illustrators, writers."

"Perhaps you are wondering: Where do you, Charlie, fit in? And what of myself? I'm glad you asked. Odds are, you have not personally developed a large language model at a large technology company. (If you have, my Signal handle is @cwarzel.92, and I would like to talk.) And yet, the odds are also decent that morsels from your life have been used to train chatbots."

Time named the architects of AI as Person of the Year and used a cover that replaces 1932 ironworkers with tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang. Investigations by Alex Reisner found that large AI companies train LLMs on massive scraped datasets containing copyrighted material often taken without creators' consent or awareness. Affected creators include musicians, filmmakers, YouTubers, podcasters, illustrators, and writers. Early findings identified datasets such as Books3; later reveals include much larger pirated-book collections, writing from movies and TV shows, and millions of hoovered-up online videos.

Read at The Atlantic