A fallout shelter will NOT keep these AI barons safe.
Just over a week ago the Washington Post wrote a story on AI headed: Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart.
“To look inside this black box we analyzed Google’s C4 dataset, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites, that have been used to instruct some high profile English language AIs , called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (Open AI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing it’s popular chatbot ChatGPT.)”
Out of the 15 million websites, my very own bobshepherdauthor.com was ranked 1,053,855 generating 21,000 “tokens” – words or phrases of text.
I started this blog back in 2009, after the publication of my first non-fiction book The Circuit – A Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller I wrote with my wife. I have regularly contributed to it over the years – not for money or fame – but because I wanted to inform the public on matters I wish to highlight. My posts are largely informed by my professional career both military and civilian spanning almost 40 years in the world’s conflict areas.
So, how does it feel to know that my body of work has been “scraped” by tech companies to build generative AI like ChatGPT? It’s like someone breaking into my home, stealing my diary from my desk, weaponizing it, and using it shoot me and my wife dead. For one, we are writing a book based on my blog posts – posts which can now be harvested by anyone with access to generative AI to write a book about my experiences – in my voice – and then slap their name on it as the “author” and sell it on Amazon. And that is just one way in which the owners of generative AI – or genAI – as it’s known are robbing me and my wife of our livelihoods.
My wife is a seasoned journalist who has covered Wall St to the War on Terror. The websites of the news organizations she’s worked for have all been scraped in the service of building genAI that threatens to further undermine a news industry which has been under siege by Big Tech since the 1990s. Journalists and all content creators are being slowly killed off by genAI that was built on the backs of their work, their creativity, their public service.
While this stealing of intellectual property goes on in the millions, no one really knows just what is fact and what is fiction…so just where are they going with this? Most definitely, honesty and integrity is clearly out of the window. What we read or hear in the future cannot be trusted whatsoever. These individuals are nothing but sociopaths willing to destroy millions of decent hard working people in order to make themselves even richer and more powerful.
Meanwhile, the sociopathic owners of these companies, some of them extremely well known billionaires, are buying up land in far away places hoping for some sort of personal citadel to secure themselves from the fallout from millions of jobs lost and the obvious anarchy that will ensue in the future.
Bob Shepherd 
Hi Bob its good reading your posts, also it’s good to see u are fit and well living in the states. You may not remember me considering ur long and distinguished career,I met u on ur last tour as SMI TTB, I was the full screw medic at the MRS Billy Royal, I have great memories of my experience in Brunei working with the TTB team and you did influence me a lot as a solider, I remember your lectures in the jungle fondly infact I think any solider from which ever country Brit, USA, NZ, Aus that ever attended one of ur lectures we all felt like we’d experienced what u did which wasn’t possible but u convared the truth and hardships that came in SF,that in a way that was comic book..but we all knew it was true and cane away just so in awe. I remember u telling me off for calling u Sir which was correct for a WO1, “call me Bob only call me Sir when the Ruperts are around ” I instantly replied ok Sir I mean Bob ..lol..and then 2 minutes later u were showing me how to mould explosives, and then chucked some P4 on the fire we had going, I dived for cover and u and another instructor pissed ur selves laughing at me ” it burns well Billy but only explodes with det cord. Just want u to know in case no one told you you inspired loads of us young squaddies I fir one felt better for having being around you even if it was such a short time, inspirational Sir and a legend all the best Bob.
A huge thank you Billy, that means a lot to me. I remember the PE4 on the fire too ha ha, hope all is well. Bob.
universal basic income coupled with a programmable central bank digital currency will give total sedate most and give complete control over anyone who dissents. there will be no mass uprising
It’s a sad world and time we’re moving in, the saddest part is people who have the power to change things appear to be the ones who are happy to sit back and let it happen. There needs to be some big changes and people held responsible for their decisions and actions.