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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline. As ever remember, you can Better offline.

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Today I'm joined by Karen Howe, the author of the upcoming book, Empire of AI, which tells the story of OpenA.I.

And the arms raised surrounding large language models.

Karen, thank you for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me, Ed.

So you describe the progress of these models and these companies as a kind of colonialism.

Can you get into that for me?

Yeah, so if you think about the way that empires of old operated during the very long history of European colonialism,

they were essentially taking resources that were not their own,

exploiting massive amounts of labor, as in not paying them,

or paying them extremely small amounts of money.

And they were doing this all under a civilizing mission,

this idea that they were bringing modernity and progress to all

of humanity when in fact what was actually happening was they were just fortifying themselves

and the empire and the people at the top of the empire. And everyone else that kind of lived in the

world had to live in the thrash of what the people at the top decided based on their whims for

what was part of their self-serving agenda. And that's essentially what we're seeing with

Empires of AI today, where they are taking data that is not their own, they're laying claim to it,

...