Fining Big Tech isn't working. Make them give away illegally trained LLMs as public domain
Opinion Last year, I wrote a piece here on El Reg about being murdered by ChatGPT as an illustration of the potential harms through the misuse of large language models and other forms of AI.
Since then, I have spoken at events across the globe on the ethical development and use of artificial intelligence – while still waiting for OpenAI to respond to my legal demands in relation to what I've alleged is the unlawful processing of my personal data in the training of their GPT models.
Essentially, global technology corporations have decided, rightly or wrongly, the law can be ignored in their pursuit of wealth and power.
Household names and startups have, and still are, scraping the internet and media to train their models, typically without paying for it and while arguing they are doing nothing wrong. Unsurprisingly, a number of them have been fined or are settling out of court after being accused of breaking rules covering not just copyright but also online safety, privacy, and data protection. Big Tech has brought private litigation and watchdog scrutiny upon it, and potentially engendered new laws to fill in any regulatory gaps.
There's a principle in the legal world, in America at least, known as the "fruit of the poisonous tree," in which evidence is inadmissible if it was illegally obtained, simply put. That evidence cannot be used to an advantage. A similar line of thinking could apply to AI systems; illegally built LLMs perhaps ought to be deleted.
