Former OpenAI employee accuses company of ‘destroying’ the internet

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping our digital landscape, especially with the inception of OpenAI, which aims to outperform most human-based tasks. However, many tech experts and users have questioned the data-securing tactics of the company, especially regarding its use of copyrighted material to train its technologies. Along similar lines, a former researcher at OpenAI, Suchir Balaji, has publicly criticised the company's use of internet data.

After spending more than four years at OpenAI, Balaji left the company in August 2023, expressing concerns about the ethical and legal implications of the technologies he helped develop at the company. Moreover, after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, and OpenAI’s reliance on copyrighted data for the tool, he began questioning its potentially harmful implications for the internet as a whole.

Further, Balaji told the New York Times, “If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company.” He also posted an essay on his website, where he showcased how much-copyrighted information from an AI system’s training dataset ultimately “makes its way to the outputs of a model.“ His analysis was that ChatGPT’s output does not meet the standard for fair use, and it obtains most of its data through the use of copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission.

Additionally, Suchir Balaji has stated that ChatGPT threatens the livelihoods of creators whose work is used for training. In response, OpenAI has rebuffed these claims. They made a statement to Gizmodo mentioning, “We build our A.I. models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness.”