Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.
If that joke seems off-colour, or crass, or some kind of manipulative stretch – please, don’t worry. I’m using the OpenAI gold standard of giving-a-toss, where the unwilling subjects of any generated content have to formally, time-consumingly and bureaucratically opt out of being used/abused/exploited any way anyone likes. I haven’t heard from Sam, so my assumption is that he’s fine with me saying that he knows exactly where Sheila is because he put her there. He is, after all, fast emerging as precisely the type to appear alongside the phrase “in plain sight”.
The past fortnight for Sam has involved the release of AI video generator Sora 2 – a staggering upgrade on the Sora of barely 10 months ago – and its instant descent into a sludge of stolen copyrighted goods. We also saw the announcement of a further web of circular bargains between OpenAI and chip firms like Nvidia and AMD that brings OpenAI’s frenzied deal tally to over $1tn this year alone. That absolutely does not mean that in addition to enabling you to watch videos of meticulously created characters get pixel-puppeted by aggressively bigoted and talentless losers, OpenAI will also enable you to lose your home in a financial crash if the bubble bursts badly.
And look, no offence to Sora’s “creators”. I often walk through art galleries and realise the stuff on the walls would be so much better if I simply stole it and drew hilarious penises on it or whatever, and that they wouldn’t have made it publicly viewable if they didn’t want that. Furthermore, no tech titans have a cultural life, so they can’t possibly imagine what could be so creatively valuable you wouldn’t want a robot to desecrate it for cash. If you’ve seen Sam’s frequent reading recommendations, you’ll know they’re literally the “business philosophy” section of a second-tier airport bookshop. Mainly this week, he wanted us to know Sora 2 was all cool and fun. “It is way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than I thought it would be,” Sam posted reassuringly. So everything’s fine! Although, I guess it helps if you’re one of the most powerful people in the world and making untold billions off this stuff, not just getting revenge-porned in a Byzantium simulation because somehow historical prompts seem to confuse the “guardrails”.
I’ve seen it said that OpenAI’s motto should be “better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”, but that cosies it preposterously. Its actual motto seems to be “we’ll do what we want and you’ll let us, bitch”. Consider Altman’s recent political journey. “To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s,” Sam warned in 2016, “it’s chilling to watch Trump in action.” He seems to have got over this in time to attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration, presumably because – if we have to extend his artless and predictable analogy – he’s now one of the industrialists welcome in the chancellery to carve up the spoils. “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president,” Sam simpered to Trump at a recent White House dinner for tech titans. “It’s a very refreshing change.” Inevitably, the Trump administration has refused to bring forward any AI regulation at all.
Meanwhile, please remember something Sam and his ironicidal maniacs said earlier this year, when it was suggested that the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek might have been trained on some of OpenAI’s work. “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” his firm’s anguished statement ran. “We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.” Hilariously, it seemed that the last entity on earth with the power to fight AI theft was OpenAI.
It was left to Hollywood talent agencies this week to extract some kind of momentary pause from Altman, who posted some flannel about trying to direct, if not hard cash, then certainly some “new kind of engagement” at those he openly called “rightsholders”. Many of us remember a time – about 15 minutes ago – when rightsholders meant the people who hold the rights. I mean, the clue’s right there in the word. But Sam is post-rights. The question is: if he’s post creative rights, can we honestly believe he isn’t effectively post other kinds of rights?
OpenAI wants what all loving platforms ultimately want: its users never to have to leave its confines. It’s clearly positioning towards being seen as the new default homepage of the web, as Meta once did. Can a heartwarming coming-of-age privacy horror-show/election distortion scandal/child harms crisis be far behind?
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Because, incredibly, we’ve already gone through this life cycle. But we’re going to do it again, aren’t we? Or, more accurately, given the unprecedented speed Sam’s firm is moving at, we already have done it again. We’ve initially lauded some mysterious tech Pied Piper as a brilliant, unconventional altruist, then belatedly realised he is not as he seemed and that his technology is more dangerous than imagined, then still failed to regulate, and are now being victimised by it. In more ways than one, this is just the terrible AI version of a movie we’ve already seen. If Altman’s models can learn, why can’t we?
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar
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