As artificial intelligence continues to advance, eliminating more traditional jobs, there is a need for a plan for society that considers the effects of the technological revolution on humans. Though the notion of providing a universal basic income (UBI) has gained traction in recent years, some think it isn’t a complete solution. Rather, computer scientist Jaron Lanier puts forward the idea of “data dignity” where humans are compensated for the data they provide to fuel new technologies.
OpenAI, a highly-influential artificial intelligence research lab, supported the idea of data dignity in a 2018 Harvard Business Review article. As they wrote, “Rhetoric from the tech sector suggests a coming wave of underemployment due to artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.” Data dignity proposes the idea of paying people fairly for their data, even when it is used in filtering, recombining, and creating AI models.
The concept can be a challenge due to the complex, and often unknown, details of how AI models absorb data. OpenAI itself has become the target of regulators, as its models often lack transparency. A major challenge for OpenAI and other companies is tracking down data and giving it back to its original creators. OpenAI’s CEO, Greg Brockman, said the company’s training data comes from a “variety of licensed, created, and publicly available data sources” but did not elaborate.
OpenAI’s language model, GPT-4, is designed to ingest information but its training data is a closely guarded secret. As Margaret Mitchell, an AI researcher who formerly worked at Google, pointed out, there may be no way to trace data back to its original creators.
In spite of this difficulty, data dignity has the potential to provide humans with economic agency and even foster the growth of a new creative class. Payment for data can help to establish ownership of information and thereby allow people to be more self-sufficient and fulfilled in the new technological economy.
OpenAI is a leading artificial intelligence research laboratory founded by scientists Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. Their research and technology have had a profound impact on the AI industry, and their language model GTP-4 is used for natural language processing and generation. Its datasets are based on a variety of licensed, created and publicly available data sources, enabling AI models to ingest information and understand language better.
Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist and one of the pioneers in the field of virtual reality. In spite of his friendship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, he puts forward the concept of “data dignity” as a potential solution to the concern that AI models may lead to a wave of mass unemployment. The concept highlights the value of data contributed by humans and proposes new methods to fairly compensate individuals for the data they generate. Lanier’s idea is to gradually include more people into the idea of data dignity, allowing for unions, guilds, and professional groups to play a role.
