Have You Heard That You Can Sell Your Data to AI Companies?
Please don't do it.
In a move that must have come about in a “how can we be more like the devil” brainstorming sesh, AI Companies are paying people cash in exchange for their data.
Thousands of people around the world are taking them up on their offer, and sharing their pictures, videos, text messages, and phone conversations to make a few extra bucks. I get it, it would certainly be nice to have more money. My five-year plan is to walk around rich neighborhoods and hope I get hit by a car. Even at my most financially successful, I thought “this is cool, I can buy anything I want - as long as that thing sucks.” So trust me, I can understand the pull toward a short-term solution of selling a few pictures of your morning walk around the block to an AI company to pay for groceries. Especially with how expensive everything is now. I don’t even know how much things are supposed to cost anymore. I just see a price and think “that’s gotta be wrong,” but it’s not wrong, grapes are $12/pound now, and there’s nothing I can do about it except just sit down and close my eyes and try to remember what grapes taste like.
They’ve also made it seem like they already know everything about us. We know our phones are listening to us. I know it even more every time I body shame myself and then open up Instagram where I immediately see an ad like: “hey, do regular pants kinda hurt you in your juicy belly?” You know they do, Instagram. You just heard me say “why can’t all pants be sweatpants?” out loud in the mirror to nobody.
We gotta hold strong. We can’t sell them our shit.
They’re offering to pay us because they’re desperate. Their stupid, useless product doesn’t work unless we train it, and they’re running out of things they can steal from the open internet. They’re looking to us to make up for it, to fill the gap with our human interactions and details of our everyday lives, and holy shit, what the fuck good reason could they possibly need that for? This is some sick shit. This is like getting fired and having to spend your final two weeks training your replacement, except the replacement is for everyone and everything, and the replacement spends its free time encouraging people to kill themselves, and some people think the replacement is their girlfriend until the replacement get an upgrade and then no longer acts like the replacement you fell in love with and…there’s no replacement for your heart. There should be. We should figure out heart replacements. But instead, science is too busy using all our drinkable water to pour on computers to cool them off after they’ve been asked to generate too much cartoon porn. Calm down, horny computer guys. Get a grip.
These companies are preying on people who are unemployed, who are living in developing countries, or who just need money to get by, and running buck wild with their likenesses after getting a worldwide, exclusive, irrevocable, transferable, and royalty-free license to use them. One user, after selling his likeness for $1000, had an AI doppelganger turn up in advertisements claiming to be a “vagina doctor” promoting questionable medical supplements for pregnant and postpartum women. But then again…if real videos of me claiming to be a “vagina doctor” leaked online, I’d totally also say that they were AI. So…maybe we need to ask this guy what the actual term for “vagina doctor” is and see how he answers before we just go on believing him.
If this sounds like something that is straight out of a sitcom…it’s because it is. Friends did the episode where Joey posed for modeling pictures and sold his likeness, and ended up on “I have STDs” billboards across New York in their first season! That’s over 30 years ago! People in the real world are acting like the dumbest character in a sitcom plot from three decades ago!
I’d like to highlight the following passage from the article that got me all riled up about this:
Mark Graham, a professor of internet geography at the University of Oxford and author of Feeding the Machine, acknowledged that for individuals in developing countries, the money can be meaningful in the short term, but warned that “structurally this work is precarious, non-progressive and effectively a dead end”.
AI marketplaces rely on a “race to the bottom in wages”, added Graham, and a “temporary demand for human data”. Once this demand shifts, “workers are left with no protections, no transferable skills, and no safety net”.
The only winner that emerges, Graham said, are “the platforms in the global north [that] capture all the enduring value”.
This is all possible because of a long process of stripping away workers’ rights and handing everything to corporations, exploiting people in developing nations, and finding out they can also get away with it right here at home. The dehumanization of people who aren’t at the top of the economic ladder is starting to become literal. Nothing matters to these ghouls except for making money, no matter what they try to tell us. They’re not trying to change the world for the better. They’re not trying to advance anything at all except for their own wealth. We have to stop buying into our own destruction.
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