Shifting Societal Sentiment Of Data
Data matters more than you think, so why do we give it away for free?
We have become accustomed to giving our data away in exchange for access to “free products” like social media or Google Maps.
If the product is free, you are the productWhile this may not have an impact on your day-to-day life, aside from personalized advertisements (which tbh, I would rather have), there is a long-term cost being exacted here.
This cost has come due in the Age of AI.
AI systems are scraping online data from the last 30 years. We have agreed to give our data in exchange for one product, only to have another company take that data – without permission – and use it in an entirely new way.
OpenAI claims that is is impossible to train AI without copyrighted data. I am not saying that I agree or disagree at this point (given the concept of fair use with Internet scraping) but what gives them the right to make that decision?
I’ll dive deeper into these topics in future entries. For now, I want to provide you with more context so that you can understand the nuances of these issues to better protect yourself ASAP.
I believe creators (which I use to refer to both creative and knowledge workers), should have a say in how their creations are used. They should have a say on whether or not they wish to be compensated for allowing their works to train AI models; either public ones like OpenAI or private ones like the company they are employed at.
Of course, with the New York Times suing OpenAI, we will eventually get legal direction from the courts on this issue.
However, what do we do in the meantime? Do we continue giving data in exchange for a product/service of one company, only to allow other companies to scrape our data as they see fit?
I believe the best strategy is to create a tiered “risk” portfolio for your data, one that varies for each person depending on their values and beliefs.
Before we get into my 3 tiered system, let’s consider why you should care to build a system in the first place.
Recalibrating Recap
Welcome to Recalibrating! My name is Callum (@_wanderloots)
Join me each week as I learn to better life in every way possible, reflecting and recalibrating along the way to keep from getting too lost as I build my world 🌍
Thanks for sharing the journey with me ✨
This week’s YouTube video is on how to live in the grey zones of life. Life is not black or white. Treating it that way can lead to stress, anxiety, and disappointment. It’s better to work on learning to live in the in-between states of awareness 😌
Last week, we touched on the concept of copying in the digital age and OpenAI’s claim that it is “impossible” to train AI without using copyrighted material. I provided some context on this issue, along with some suggestions on how we can use various technologies to improve the safety of sharing data in the future.
This week, we are going to continue by discussing the importance of understanding how your data is being used so that you can structure a system that allows you to hold onto your value as a creator (creative or knowledge worker) in the age of AI.
The Bigger Picture: Hold Onto Your Value (if you can 👀)
We have become accustomed to certain types of assets being “free”. Digital assets are intangible (not physical), so we don’t feel their loss when we publish them online. They are infinitely replicable in the digital world.
We give away our thoughts, ideas, and insights. We give away our art, creations, and words. We exchange these valuable intangibles for various reasons:
- on social media, to build an audience and participate in an algorithm that will promote our works;
- on websites, to rank for search algorithms to increase traffic to the site;
- at a corporation, in exchange for financial gain and professional reputation;
- and many more.
Of course, giving away thoughts, knowledge, and ideas as part of corporate employment hardly seems unfair. It’s not, it’s part of employment contracts.
The same could be said for sharing on social media and on blogs and other websites. It’s true, there has been an exchange of value. Whether or not the value exchange is fair can only be determined on a case-by-case basis.
I am not referring to these types of relationships when I speak of the devaluation of digital goods.
I am referring to the long-term value that you give and the lack of consideration you get in return. We often think in short-term exchange of value, and that is having an impact on our long-term understanding.
These transactional relationships have indoctrinated us with a flawed understanding of intangible value.
Many people do not consider the impact of the data they are generating and how it will be used far beyond their time at a corporation, search engine index, or social media account.
Many people do not consider the future, or how AI will impact it.
The Future of Value: Creators & Self-Employment
First, let’s take a look at creative workers.
In the past, giving away content on social media was not a big deal. It got your work in front of an audience, promoted by an algorithm. Over time, creators built up their personal brand to be of more value to their audience.
However, over time, the audience was desensitized. People spend 2 seconds looking at a photo that cost me $5,000 to capture (equipment + travel) and 20+ hours to edit.
It’s hard to see the value behind the image when there are millions of images to look at.
Over time, people have begun to lose appreciation for what it means to create art in the first place.
Creation has been devalued.
This devaluation has led to companies like OpenAI claiming that it is impossible to train AI without copyrighted material. What a bold claim 🤯.
I bet they never would have tried it if web2 (current social media/the Internet) has effectively been operating in the same way for years.
While I understand the value in progressing society with AI, I also see the slippery slope this statement creates when considering the human value of creativity in the long run.
If AI can take everything online and use it to create whatever it wants, whenever it wants, instantaneously — what little value that remains of human creativity will be lost in the noise of trillions of AI generated works.
Most people in society do not care. Most people think they do not create anything, so why should they care?
Well, let’s take a moment to consider employment.
In my experience, you either fall within the employee bucket or the creator (self-employed) bucket.
This message is for all of you.
The Future of Value: Employment
In the past, giving good ideas to your corporation would increase and cement loyalty between corporation and employee. Both succeeded when both were successful. However, people don’t stay at the same job like they used to.
The pandemic increased this effect, causing more and more people to change jobs/companies as the world changed and values shifted.
Remote work became the norm, so the perks corporations provided waned in the light of the convenience of working online. We transitioned more and more to digital asset creation as the main focus of employment of knowledge workers.
Artificial intelligence will shift that value even more.
Society has become accustomed to employment value transfer on a salaried basis, year-by-year, rather than decade-by-decade.
Rather than a lifetime.
We pay into pension plans with money earned from employment, cementing our future retirement in ~40+ years. Forty years!! (If that’s not something that requires long-term thinking, I don’t know what is).
Assets we develop while employed include our professional reputation within the company (personal brand). This asset secures our ability (hopefully) to get another job in the future; there is no guarantee.
We also develop goodwill with the public (a form of intellectual property). However, in my experience, individual goodwill resides more with the company than the individual. Part of this imbalance comes from a focus of “learning the job” for years before learning to network and build up a personal brand or book of business.
The value of the individual becomes linked to the value of the company. If the company tanks, the individual’s reputation may also take a hit (and vice versa).
The value of the individual is subsumed (absorbed) into the larger brand of the employer.
However, there is another asset we generate during our time as knowledge workers: data.
The Future of Value: Data & AI
The historic data and digital assets we create while working do not come with us when we leave. They stay within the company as part of their proprietary dataset. Our documents, emails, work products, and most importantly, ideas.
Our personal brands.
In the past, this wasn’t a big deal (for the most part), and was likely very reasonable given employment contracts. In the past, the employer would only be able to continue generating that data with you as the employee doing the work.
In the past, we didn’t have AI.
AI systems thrive on data. In particular, they thrive on good data. The better the work product, the better the idea, the better the AI model will be trained.
In the future, companies will be able to generate digital works (data) without you being there.
All of the historical data generated by all employees in the company will be used to train AI models that can be customized for each company.
The more value you have contributed to the company, the better the AI model will be.
If this is the case (which it is, consider all of the tech layoffs over the last year), how can knowledge workers retain their value in light of AI workers?
Similarly, in the creator economy, how will creative workers maintain value with AI systems trained on millions of their images?
The long-term value of all individual knowledge-based assets is declining in the wake of a collectively-sourced AI model.
How will you maintain a competitive edge?
Generalized vs Customized Data
The first thing to remember is that current AI systems available to the public are generalized. ChatGPT has been trained on large swaths of the Internet as a whole, which produces outputs that are generalized.
Creators (knowledge and creative workers) have developed specialized knowledge over many years of experience. Employers training AI models with employee’s work products are doing so with more customized data than a generic AI like ChatGPT.
The value of workers increases over time due to their increasing knowledge and experience. In other words, their increasing specialization and customized work output increases their value.
The more unique the work output style is, the higher the value of the work being done because fewer people would be able to replicate that work.
To maintain a competitive edge in the future, I highly recommend that you start thinking about your unique work output and how you can retain a competitive edge.
Knowing that AI model will continue to be trained on the ever-increasing amount of data, you can leverage your knowledge of what makes you valuable in the long-term (your personal brand and unique style) and begin accumulating your own dataset to train your own customized AI.
This AI will help you keep up with other people who are using AI tools (including companies) and will delay the decline in your value as companies begin training AI employee models.
I do not say all of this to scare you (though I know the thought is scary). I say this so that you can begin thinking of the future in a practical and well-thought out manner, rather than going along for the ride like the masses will – to their inevitable downfall.
If you are struggling with anxiety over AI (AI-nxiety), I have an article that discusses this topic in more depth.
For now, let’s consider the future.
Predicting The Future of Personal Brands
I am not saying all jobs will be replaced by AI. The most likely outcome for the near future is that people who learn to use AI systems will perform better than those that don’t.
This study by the Boston Consulting Group provides excellent insight and commentary on the use of AI in the workforce. Effectively, employees performing in the bottom half of the company were able to rise to at or above average with the use of AI.
AI operates as a skill-leveller.
To those with their eyes open, we will see a strategic shift of passing certain types of works to AI, allowing for human emphasis on tasks that are better performed by humans.
However, the continued use of AI and the training of internal models will inevitably improve the quality of the AI output. Effectively, human knowledge workers are working to make themselves obsolete.
Knowledge workers must be careful to continue developing their own personal brand while contributing their ideas to their companies. This personal brand development can be done through a digital identity (the topic of my next YouTube video, stay tuned). I also published an article while at my job as a lawyer that you can read here.
Similarly, AI models will continue scraping the Internet for creative works. We MAY introduce compensation models, but to do so, we need a way to track who is contributing to these models.
We need to be more intentional with how we put data in public, which data we put behind paywalls, and which data we keep out of the public sphere entirely.
Another solution is blockchain, which I discuss more in last week’s entry. I also have an introduction to web3 and blockchain FAQ here. I’ll get deeper into blockchain later.
Now, in my opinion, it is more important than ever to ensure that your personal brand as an individual is increased while benefiting your company.
Otherwise, when you leave, what happens to all of the ideas you gave away? How will you protect your long-term value?
My 3 Tier Data System To Reduce Risk Long-Term
I assume that everything I put in public will be stolen. It is not what I want, but it has happened too many times to me and others I know – to assume otherwise would be folly.
In some cases, I will put in the effort to get the stolen content taken down, whether by DMing the thief or filing a DMCA takedown request.
I know many others will also charge the thief damages for stealing their intellectual property (which only works if you can find out their identity).
However, these actions are tedious.
A safer way, in my opinion, is to more carefully curate the information I put into the public sphere.
I look at the value I have (based on my experiences as an intellectual property lawyer, patent agent, engineer, artist, photographer, writer, and traveller) and I decide how I would like to curate that value to share in the public.
In a sense, I take the full value I have to offer, and I split it into different paths that are accessible to different levels of people:
- Public (Free or Authenticated)
- Digital Stream & Garden
- Blockchain works
- Semi-Public (Paywalled):
- Private
- second brain/digital mind
To understand which data, information, and knowledge goes into each datastream, I must be self-aware of my own value.
Self-awareness is a vastly underrated skill that, if developed, will improve the quality of your life for the rest of your life.
Remember, 95% of people think they are self-aware, while only 10-15% actually are.
Practical Example Of Planning For Long-Term Value
Now, I am not suggesting that you try to hide value from your employers if you are employed, or that you stop posting online if you are in the creative world.
Instead, I want you to start thinking about the different types of value that you generate over time and how you can begin building your own asset on the side that is tied to you as an individual.
For example, if you are writing memos, emails, patents, contracts, proposals, reports, one-pagers, campaigns, etc., of course you must do your job to the best of your ability to generate the work product you are being paid to create.
However, there is SO much more value that you are generating while you are creating these documents (intangible assets). You are learning how to create the documents, learning about what is a good format and what is bad, learning about what performs well and what doesn’t.
I cannot imagine an employer would fault their employee for taking notes on what they are learning on their own personal computers (provided they are not using confidential information of course).
The more you track your own personal development over time, the more you will have a clearer understanding of what your personal brand is in the first place. The better you will understand the skills you have to pass onto others in the future, diversifying your ability to generate income in the long-term.
The best teachers recognize that their ideal student is 2 steps behind them on whatever their journey is. Whichever path they are following, knowledge can be passed along to those that come behind you.
This knowledge can be shared as part of your digital identity to develop your personal brand, building public value that will stay with you if you ever leave your job.
There is a reason our economy is built on knowledge workers. We have shifted (mostly) to a society that values productions of the mind over everything else.
What are you doing to augment your knowledge in this AI world?
Next week
I seem to have run out of room again to discuss my different data tiers more in-depth. That’s okay, it’s more important at this stage that you understand the context of digital value and how it ties into your future in an AI world.
If you have any questions on what I have discussed, please respond by email or leave a comment on Substack. Your feedback is greatly appreciated ✨
Next week, I’ll (hopefully) start getting deeper into digital identity and the different data tiers I mentioned above.
Stay tuned ✨
P.S. If you are interested in learning how I build my digital mind (second brain) to help me process information and identify patterns to solve my problems, please consider upgrading your subscription to paid. Your support means more than you know 😌 ✨
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Book of the week: Psychology of Money
It’s wild to think that a major financial concept like retirement has only really been around for the last 60 years or so.
We have so many conceptions of money that cannot be explained with historical data, since the history of that concept did not last long enough to generate sufficient trends.
However, the way people think about money has not changed much. The more I understand about the psychology of money, the more I appreciate how emotions play a larger role in people’s success than financial logic.
Note: this book is currently 30% off on Amazon
Photo of the week: Silverback Gorilla in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (Uganda)
One of my favourite photos taken in the deepest jungles of Uganda. Available as a print on my Darkroom.
In Other News:
The Bitcoin ETFs have launched, allowing people to invest in Bitcoin without directly purchasing it.
The Vision Pro has launched (as of yesterday). It sold out in 15 minutes, meaning that Apple made over $300,000,000 in sales almost instantly. I can’t wait for it to become available in Canada 🥽
