Pay Attention: AI Companies Need to Reassess Data Payment Strategies, Warns Lanier

Jaron Lanier raises concerns about the proposal put forth by influential individuals in Silicon Valley, who believe that artificial intelligence will generate substantial wealth that can be shared with those affected by its impact.

“I don’t want to create more people who just depend on government payments to survive,” said Lanier, a technology pioneer and Microsoft Corp.’s Prime Unifying Scientist. “I want to create more, if you will, creative groups of people who are really good at generating fresh data that makes the models work better. So everyone benefits.”

Lanier made his remarks during a wide-ranging interview on the latest episode of the Bloomberg Originals series AI IRL, which is now streaming. (Although he is employed by Microsoft, he does not speak for the company publicly.)

AI systems, including those that support chatbots like ChatGPT, ingest large amounts of web data to process user requests and provide relevant responses. Lanier argues that AI companies must work to determine which individuals provided the most useful data to these services. The goal is to get fairer compensation for people.

“To do that, we need to calculate and show the provenance of which human sources were most important for a given AI,” he said. “We’re not doing it right now. We can do it effectively and efficiently, we’re just not. It has to be a societal decision to move to it.”

Lanier, a computer scientist and researcher, is a respected Silicon Valley multidisciplinary veteran who is considered both the godfather of innovation, including virtual reality, but also a vocal critic of the tech industry itself. He said at AI IRL that he still considers himself an optimist about the role of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence in society.

“To be an optimist, you have to have the courage to be a fearsome critic,” Lanier said. “I have been very critical of how we operate on social media. I’ve been very critical of a lot of things.” But he added, “a critic believes things can be better. Critics are real optimists, even if they don’t want to admit it.”