What do generative AI tech “startups” OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) and rivals Anthropic, Cohere and Perplexity all have in common? They are privately held companies valued (or soon to be valued) in excess of $1 billion, making them “unicorns” in the lexicon of Silicon Valley.
Here’s another thing they all have in common. They built potentially transformational technology that is essentially useless without the content on which it is “trained” to deliver its results. And they get that requisite content by scraping the vast Internet, sucking up millions of copyrighted works in the process — all without consent.
These generative AI leaders — and other leading genAI tech innovators well on their way to unicorn status, such as music-focused Suno and video generator Haiper — defend their relentless non-consensual “training” practice as just being part of answering to the higher calling of social progress.