The hypocrisy at the heart of the AI industry
- Mar 23
- 1 min read
THE ATLANTIC — In April 2024, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and a current AI evangelist, gave a closed-door lecture to a group of Stanford students. If these young people hoped to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Schmidt explained, then they should be prepared to breach some ethical boundaries.
At that point, 19 lawsuits had been filed against generative-AI companies for copyright infringement, alleging that Anthropic, OpenAI, and others had stolen books and other media to train their generative models.
Yet Schmidt told the students to go ahead and download whatever they need to build an accurate “test” version of their AI product. If the product takes off, “then you hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” he said. “If nobody uses your product, then it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”
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