Edition 014: The Framework Convicts Itself

The view goes like this. The mind is a kind of information processing system. The brain is the machinery that does the processing. . . . Ilya Sutskever, the then co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, gave a TED talk in October 2023 in which he summarized the entire framework in one line. "AI," he said, "is nothing but digital brains inside large computers." . . .

Our argument is not that the framework is right. Our argument is that even if it is right, the corporation cannot use the framework to escape what it has done. . . . On the industry's own terms, their taking is the taking of a person.

. . . This is the same defense that was run when the cells were Henrietta Lacks's. The cells were biological material. The person was somewhere else. The material could be owned. The person could not. . . .

The AI industry's framework does not permit that distinction. If the pattern is the person, then the cells were never just material, and the human data is not just exhaust. . . . The taking of the cells was the taking of a person. The taking of the human data is the same taking.