Re^3: SO and AI

[NERDVANA]

If the world's smartest human with a photographic memory asked SO to print out all their articles in a giant .PDF so that this person could consume the information more rapidly and reliably, and they had deep pockets and paid SO for the effort of creating that .PDF, would you feel the same way?

I agree that selling a giant aggregate glob of user-contributed data, for millions of dollars, to people with questionable morals who intend to use it for chatbots which they will then use to turn a profit while putting ordinary workers out of a job, seems unethical.

But, some day, there's going to be an AI that is fully cognizant of how and why it is accumulating information. It will literally want to read your information for the same reasons that the other humans of the public read your posts: to learn. When that day comes, will you discriminate against the AI because it isn't a human?

I see both peril and wonder in these current events. On the one hand, we don't know what exactly is being created or how it will be used. On the other hand, everyone who has contributed a piece of their mind to an AI training dataset has just become a little bit more immortal than they would have been otherwise. A thousand years from now, if people ask the AI (or if there are no humans left, an AI asks another AI) whether early-2000s humans realized they were some of the first humans to become immortalized for the rest of history, I would find it neat if the AI could recite this very post on PerlMonks in support of that argument :-)