With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

So, from here on in, I will try to refer to ‘decision making systems’ rather than ‘artificial intelligences’. Corporations are systems, and the make decisions, so they’re decisions making systems. The question is whether they’re black boxes or not — whether we are able to attribute the actions of the corporation to individual human beings within it.

Corporations are decision-making systems, not ‘intelligences’. They have homeostatic forces which aim to maintain their equilibrium, and higher-order decision-making systems which mean they are able to reorganise themselves in order to respond to shocks beyond the scope of anything anticipated when they were designed. To attribute motivation to them is to make assumptions about the internal workings of the black box — the original intellectual sin of cybernetic analysis.

In 2018, the book Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble, a professor of information, gender, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, had extensively documented the replication of racist worldviews in Google’s search results, such as by showing far more sexually explicit and pornographic content for “Black girls” than “white girls” and tropes about Black women being angry. Google at the time had used an older generation of language models to curate those results, which in extreme cases, Noble argued, may have also provoked racial violence.

To solve OpenAI’s data bottleneck, Brockman turned to a new source: YouTube. OpenAI had previously avoided this option—scraping YouTube to train OpenAI’s models, YouTube’s CEO would later confirm, violated the platform’s terms of service. But under the new existential pressure for more data, the question became whether YouTube, or its parent, Google, would enforce it. If Google cracked down, it could jeopardize its own ability to scrape other websites for its large language model development. Brockman was willing to take the risk.