AI's Rendering of GDP Belongs To Us

Drill, baby, drill. But pay up.

The Gross Documented Product must stop being the unlimited free and natural resource that it is today, for AI companies to solely profit from.

Gross Documented Product -

n. every documented word, picture, audio or video, that has ever been made by a person, that is uploaded or uploadable, to the internet or a private AI database

AI companies generate content with our GDP. We, in turn, consume it. But we are not just the “consumers” that read, watch and listen to it. We are the producers of it. All of us, and our ancestors, made it. We made all of the underlying source material. All of the original content that AI remixes, mashes up, then spits out in the form of a generative output. We produced 100% of the content found within the GDP, the Gross Documented Product.

We not only made all of the original underlying source content. We are also the product. We are what is for sale. Our user-data is the actual product. That is sold by Big Tech. To the marketers and advertisers. That robocall and text your phones. Spam your email's inboxes. And post targeted ads onto your social media scrolls.

The Solution (proposed by Jaron Lanier)

Jaron Lanier’s proposed solution is named Data Dignity. It would resemble UBI (Universal Basic Income), but would be more forensic, wiser, and earned.

Two elements -

One. Attribution, as in, any-all generative AI output must list/pie-graph said output’s primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. source(s) - attributing credit to its author(s).

Two. Any person’s content that is used as an underlying source of content for a generative AI output - that person is automatically distributed compensation by said AI company. Distribution of said money would operationally work like how iTunes pays musicians right now. Any source data that is over 100 years old becomes public domain - like songs do.

The devil is the details from here. But please know that your content is being used in more cases by AI companies as a free and natural resource than you probably imagine. Even on your content that you passively create, with no active intention of “authoring” a contribution to the GDP.

One random example - your private Facebook Messenger conversation with your Japanese vacation-planner, both of you are bilingual, your primary language is English, your vacation-planner’s primary language is Japanese, you both conduct a JapEnglishy conversation, this conversation is purchased as anonymous data from Facebook by the likes of Rosetta Stone, for the purpose of the further and ongoing training on the AI that powers their language-learning software.

These examples will only increase. That vacation planner and you should get paid. And if some generative output out there ever outputs the version of the acronym GDP that I coined for this piece here, Gross Documented Product, I should get paid.