Will generative AI push the boundaries of creativity and expand human knowledge? Well, that's certainly what its boosters think. Here's Sam Olman, CEO of Open AI. I think the creative spirit of humanity is an incredibly important thing and we want to build tools that lift that up that make it so that new people can create better art, better content, write better novels that we all enjoy.

But according to many authors, artists, and journalists, it's all based on theft. That's because companies like OpenAI need the material to train their models, and a whole lot of that material is under copyright. Some groups are now about to challenge that in court. Recently, a coalition of Canadian news outlets got permission to proceed with a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. So, what are their chances? And how could lawsuits like this change the future of AI and of journalism?

Then, rich oligarchs aren't just remaking the tech world, they're also increasingly reshaping democracy. I talked to author Jacob Silverman about his new book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. This is the rundown.

Last year, a group of Canadian media companies launched a lawsuit against Open AI. Here's a bit of the joint statement they released at the time. Open AI regularly breaches copyright and online terms of use by scraping large swats of content from Canadian media to help develop its products such as chat GBT. Open AI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content without getting permission or compensating content owners.

Now, an Ontario court has decided the case can proceed here. I asked Kevin Seu, an intellectual property lawyer with Gilbert LLP, how this case is shaping up and how worried Open AI should be about the multiple cases that have been filed against it.

The plaintiffs in the copyright case against Open AI in Ontario include the Canadian Press, Tourar, the Glob and Mail, Post Media, and CBC. What are their main complaints?

So this is a conglomeration of I think most of Canada's biggest news publishers and their complaints are um pretty broad but largely they focus on um OpenAI's use of various news articles that they've scraped from um online. So as you know you know you can access CBC or the Toronto Star and get some news articles. um some of them are paywalled and you can access those articles and their complaint is that OpenAI has um copied, downloaded, scraped some of these articles and used it to train um their chat GPT model in order to produce the product chat GPT.

OpenAI uses what's known as retrieval augmented generation. Uh and it's quite central to this case for people who don't know including myself. What does that actually mean? Yeah. So retrieval augmented generation or rag is the acronym that's often used ra um that refers to one part of the sort of output process for these large language models. So if you've ever used chatpt and you um you know enter some input and the chat GPT bot says something um it goes through a couple of processes. One process is is sort of taking your input um determining what it should do and then there's a process at the end called uh ra which is used to prevent or limit hallucinations. What it does is um when the output is about to be um coming out from the LLM, the large language model, the rag system usually is designed to um access a fact storage or or access the internet and fact check its own output before giving you an answer so that it can you know limit the amount of hallucination um that the uh the chat bot gives you.

So here in Canada we have fair dealing uh which for people who don't know is a law that allows us to use copyrighted material without permission for certain purposes. One of them including news reporting as well. Um could open AAI have its copyrighted material use that instead?

Yeah. So fair dealing is a very nuanced subject. Um it's often used as a defense but it's it's called it's also been called a user's right in Canada. So if you or I were just researching news um for our own educational purposes, then we would be able to, you know, uh buy a newspaper or access it online and we can read it and perhaps um you know, reproduce a bit of it, you know, send it back and forth for mark it up for research. Um and those are sort of allowable fair dealing purposes. They're sort of a scope um of permitted activities that users in Canada are allowed to do with copyrighted works like books and news articles. And this is a central doctrine in Canadian copyright law. Um but it has certain limits to it. There are specified purposes like education um and research where you're definitely allowed to um use the fair deal uh work in a manner that is in accordance with fair dealing subject to some limitations but it often depends on what you're doing and how much um you're using that work for.

Yeah. So I mean I think there are two aspects to it at least two aspects there are many more than that but one is as you've identified it's it's monetary it's commercial um which you know goes back to your last question about fair dealing one of the factors as to whe whether some use is fair or not under Canadian law um includes how commercial that is so is someone like OpenAI or any other company making a lot of money off of right you know Toronto Star or CBC's news articles and you know they do charge a fee for um using some of their you know pro or plus versions of their products. So they are making some amount of money. Um and so at stake in part is who can profit off of those works.

Uh you know obviously for news organizations um the core of their business is you know selling newspapers selling subscriptions to their website and licensing their content to various outlets. And you know, as far as we know and as complained in the lawsuit, OpenAI hasn't paid any licensing fees for the use of those works. So a large aspect of this is, you know, should OpenAI pay for the use of those works and how much should they pay for the use of those works? Because, you know, some aspects of it is if you're, again, let's take an example. if it's just me and you going to buy a newspaper, you know, we're paying a pretty low amount of money and we're not really profiting off of it. But a large company like Open AAI, which is, you know, has millions of users, how much should they pay for um the use of articles and they use many millions of articles. Um so that's, you know, a key aspect of the case.

What happens? Uh let's say this court case goes through and and the business model of OpenAI changes where they do have to pay for something. How does that impact their bottom line and their business model? Well, you know, I'm not the I'm not in charge of Open AI, uh, thank goodness, but um, you know, I think it it it's pretty fundamental to how they operate. And I think um if you sort of take apart and look at it at a at a more high level view for most of these companies who develop large language models, right, a part of the technological innovation that they they claim to have brought um to the forefront these days is that they've they've used or they've ingested into their AI models a large portion if not all of the internet. You know, they claim, you know, that's the large in large language model. Um, and if they have to pay for a significant or all of the content that they're consuming, then it really could um impact their bottom line because they, you know, they're they're certainly using a lot of data. They're they're continually scraping um information and, you know, depending on how much they have to pay to access or use that content. Um, it could really impact whether or not those models become financially viable.

US tech oligarchs are very very rich and many of them are also very angry at the woke mind virus at regulation at democracy and they're using their extraordinary wealth and power to try to make the world reflect their vision. I sat down with Jacob Silverman, author of the new book Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, and host of the CBC podcast, The Making of Elon Musk, to find out how men like Elon Musk and Peter Theel are combining corporate and government power in pursuit of their goals.

In many ways, the Silicon Valley of today is actually returning to its early roots. But, uh, in the 70s and 80s, especially coming out of the 60s and 70s counterculture, the tech industry was seen as kind of a new frontier and a new area of almost countercultural experimentation. A lot of people, a lot of hippies who were involved in the hippie movement in San Francisco ended up uh, getting learning how to program or getting involved in tech. And it was certainly seen as an industry that was much more liberal and progressive in its attitudes, open to kind of uh new forms of social experimentation. And it wasn't seen and I think in inside as well the industry, it wasn't seen as close to the government or supporting the prerogatives of say the national security state or US foreign policy. And we had that general attitude or culture for a little while certainly in the 80s and 90s. I I would say that was kind of the prevailing attitude in tech. Um, but things really started to change after 9/11 and then have kind of intensified in recent years, I would say, until we're almost more back to the relationship that tech had in in the 50s and 60s when it was being directly funded by the Defense Department.

All right, so let's uh fast forward here to uh 2024, the presidential election. Uh, according to the Washington Post, 80% of San Francisco residents and about 70% of residents in the counties near Silicon Valley vote for Kla Harris. So explain to me what do you mean by radicalization and sort of who are the poster boys and I say poster boys because incidentally they are all men.

They are all men. I mean there are a few prominent women in tech who are Trump supporters like Saffric Catz uh who was the co-CEO of Oracle or Genie Remedi from IBM. But you know this we are talking about and this book is a little bit of a group biography of 20 to 30 men almost all white men who uh are millionaires and billionaires. They are uh CEOs of tech companies. They are venture capitalists. And of course at the top of this heap is Elon Musk. But there's also a lot of his friends and colleagues, people from the greater PayPal mafia as it's been called. Peter Teal has long been probably the most important Silicon Valley conservative. And I think what changed really in the last few years leading up to the 2024 election was that you had some traditional tech conservatives like Peter Teal or someone like David Saxs or some lesserk known names like Doug Leon who's a major venture capitalists but then you had a lot of their friends and colleagues people of a similar social status and economic status who who spent time with the with them who really did start getting radicalized against the Democrats and Republican party.

And some of that, I think, did really start in San Francisco where they started to see San Francisco as a failed city. And they blamed it on liberals and on Democrats and they saw they feared that what was happening in San Francisco, some of its its social issues, the homelessness, the open air drug use, they essentially decided that it couldn't be fixed. And not only that, it was spreading to other cities. And that I think explains a lot of the transformation. And then you also had um some of these CEOs, people like Mark Andre, who's a major venture capitalist, starting to think that um the social justice movements of the time like Black Lives Matter or more recently some of the protests against uh Israeli military activity in Gaza um that they just found those movements unacceptable. Um you hear from senior people in tech, but publicly especially that um they think that this is wokeness gone a muck or this is something that's gone too far. So whatever vision of kind of liberal attitudes or even social justice that some of these CEOs and venture capitalists may have tolerated before certainly during the co era that started changing to a degree that they they either didn't recognize or weren't willing to tolerate anymore.

He is sort of the the presiding godfather of this movement, I would say. I mean, he is a political animal from from the beginning. And someone like Elon Musk, I would argue, wasn't before. But, uh, Teal has been a hardcore conservative/ libertarian since he was in college at Stanford. He founded a a conservative publication called the Stanford Review. He's been hiring people from that magazine ever since for his companies. And um, he was also a writer for a while and he co-wrote a book called Thy Diversity Myth, which was basically today we' call it kind of like an anti-woke [clears throat] sort of rabble rousing sort of book. At the time, the the big bogey man was multiculturalism, which and political correctness, which in the early 90s kind of meant the same thing as what we might talk about wokeness or progressive politics now.

So, that has always been something important to Teal. Max Chaffkin, who wrote a biography of Peter Teal, has said that the PayPal Mafia Network, which we know as sort of the group of people who got really rich at PayPal and funded all these companies afterwards, started more as a political network, uh, Chaffkin has said, rather than a business one. Yes, it came out of PayPal, but these were people who were very some of them were very interested in politics, including Teal. And Teal was the Silicon Valley figure during the 2016 election who was kind of helping broker those connections between Silicon Valley and MAGA and the Trump campaign.

Well, Teal himself would say that um the the Trump camp the Trump administration was a little too chaotic for him. And I think there was some dissatisfaction among people in tech or certainly some of Trump's conservative supporters that they didn't get done the things that they wanted to get done. At the same time during the Biden administration there this is when COVID was raging. This is when some of these uh entrepreneurs are coming into more conflicts with the state than they were used to. I would still argue that these weren't necessarily major conflicts by most standards, but for example, like some of the the shutdowns or quarantine uh methods during COVID, Elon Musk especially was very upset about having to shut down his main factory in Fremont, California, his main Tesla factory. And that was something he bowed with local authorities about. He eventually said, "You know what? I'm going to open it anyway. If you need to arrest someone, let it be me." In his sort of typical overdramatic style.

Um but there were other instances like Mark Andre, major venture capitalist, major political player now. He said that the red line for him was when the Biden administration proposed attacks on unrealized capital gains. It was really only over a very high amount of money, millions and millions of dollars. But this meant that if you were say a venture capitalist who invests in a startup, it goes public, the stock booms, and say you you have a hundred $100 million in paper gains, you might you maybe have to pay some taxes on it. Now, it's worth noting this was not implemented under the B administration. It was just proposed, right? But that was something that Andre on his own podcast said was a red line and he really didn't like. So um for some of these different people they were different things but they they saw themselves now as being a little more oppressed by the powers that be.

uh I how much of this radicalization of US politics can be traced back to 2010 because something big happens in 2010 Supreme Court citizens united decision. Help us understand how that kind of opens up this door for tech elites to sort of some would say meddal in in some of the politics here. So now we live in the era in the US of unlimited spending for for political campaigns.

How much money are we talking? Give us a sense of that. Sure. I mean the last election must donate more than or donated is a funny term but put forward more than $200 million probably closer to 300. The crypto industry who I talk a lot about in my book um became the biggest donor by industry. They donated about $200 million mostly to uh one political action committee, one of these super PACs called Fair Shake. And I I think in especially in the last election, the the tech industry, you know, they when they go get into something, sometimes they go all the way, you know, and they're used to raising huge amounts of money. So to put 200 or $400 million towards a political goal for them makes a kind of sense. And you know, we had seen since 2010 a lot of money flooding into politics and these huge super PACs being created, but we had never really seen one industry or really tech and crypto together. they're they're kind of one and the same uh put forward so much money at the same time and that I think was really novel and at the same time you also had individual tech leaders most notably Elon Musk basically implant themselves within the Trump campaign and Musk himself starting to be on stage a lot and at Trump's side and that kind of behavior was also something we hadn't really seen before.

All right, I want to come back to a point that we were talking about sort of uh local politics. A few years ago, uh wealthy tech mogul started weighing in on local politics in San Francisco specifically. I want to read a quote uh from Gil Duran, a San Francisco based journalist, alarmed by the political ambitions of those people that you mentioned in your book. These people have enough money to be dumb and dangerous for a very long time. They have to start finding ways to seize territory and power and create a different world that doesn't look anything like the United States we have today. I think what we're seeing here in San Francisco politics is like the emergence of that strategy. What are some of the examples of the strategy that Duran is uh describing?

Well, there there are a couple of important things there. For one thing, the one of the one of the changes that we've seeded seeing a few years ago was uh tech people in San Francisco putting a lot more money into local politics because they realized they can get something for their money. So we saw a recall of members of the San Francisco school board, something that had never happened before. There was and people like David Saxs, who's now Trump's AI and cryptozar, were at the head of this. He was donating a lot of money. And then they tried to recall Governor Gavin Newsome. That actually wasn't successful. But then they had a big victory when they recalled the district attorney Chasa Bodin who was considered this reformist progressive DA but really got tred as someone who was a sororos DA who was you know letting criminals off and and responsible for an upsurge of crime in San Francisco and that that was actually at the time even a misreading of the situation. I would say that the crime didn't uh necessarily crime violent crime wasn't in a bad way in San Francisco. what you had was a lot of uh social destitution. You had a lot of property crime and non-violent crime, but it had become very visible to people there and and intolerable to the San Francisco elites.

So, that's kind of where it started. And when Gil is talking about seizing actual land and territory and there's kind of two tracks that we see the tech elites on. They're involved in regular politics, you know, trying to influence what's happening in San Francisco and nationally via Trump, but they are also uh part of these movements. One's called the the network state movement that Gil reports very well on. They're also called charter cities where they're actually trying to gain land where they can have sovereignty over it. Let's talk about it. Honduras. What's happening?

Honduras is the big one which is there's an island called Roatan there and there's a settlement called Prospera which is owned by an American company, a piece of land there that under a previous more right-wing Honduran regime, they were able to essentially buy sovereignty over this land and turn it into a charter city. And the main goal of these things is really to escape taxes, to have a sort of bespoke nation that is somewhat of a dictatorship, you know, run by a small group of tech elites. And one thing that they talk about a lot that they want to do in these kinds of charter cities are medical experiments that may not be legal in in the US or other countries. This very much relates to the industry's interests in life extension research or or radical forms of human experimentation that most of us probably aren't that comfortable with yet. Uh and there h there are a lot of efforts going on right now from in Honduras to even places in the United States to the open ocean uh to um Greenland. Uh there's a there's a big uh charter city startup that would be very happy to see Trump and the United States take over Greenland because that's another possible territory. But um really what they're looking for are places with weak sovereignty or places where the local government has given up and they can hand it over to a corporation essentially or a few American venture capitalists and say here start your own community and you know it's often presented as hey this is just what's wrong with a new community or building something new but it the in practice these things look more like mini dictatorships that are are really there to serve a few millionaires and billionaires.

You mentioned Greenland, so right off the bat, I'm thinking of Vice President JD Vance. Maybe not a a favorite there, but uh you talk about him a bit in in this book. Uh he was sponsored early in his political career by Peter Teal. Um did Teal create JD Vance in his own image or in a in the same way he created say Prosper? Vance was someone who met Teal a little at a different point in his life when he was at Yale Law School and he as as Teal I mean as Vance has described it uh he was felt a little lost. I mean Vance is someone who through his own narrative and and his uh memoir has described himself as searching for a sense of identity at different points of his life. I mean he even changed his name a couple times. He went into the Marines. He uh he was trying to escape kind times hard luck upbringing. And when he met Teal at Teal came to to give a speech at Yale, Teal is someone who goes to a lot of colleges even still to give speeches. And according to his account, he heard someone there who he thought was very smart, but also telling him to kind of get away from the merit-driven rat race of elite law. And also what he liked about Teal is that Teal's religious. He's a Christian. And that appealed a lot to Vance. And after that, Vance got in touch with him. And from there his whole life really changed and was shaped by by Teal. But it it was a it was a choice I would say of Vances of them of him seeing someone who he could use as a model and a mentor and then really going for it.

All right. Many right-wing moguls have denounced DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion policies. Uh but I'm hoping you can help me understand the irony here because it seems in their own way these wealthy tech mogul are obsessed with identity. Mhm. How so?

Yeah. Uh certainly a lot of them consider themselves elites and some of them consider themselves genetic elites. I mean and so in that way there what's the distinction between those two? Well, you unfortunately you see a a recurrence in what could politely be called eugenics in a lot of Silicon Valley. I mean, not just what I was talking about with um this research into life extension, but uh a lot of research into um IVF and different reproductive procedures that go beyond just trying to, you know, make people fertile or ability to reproduce, but actually, you know, screening babies for or embryos for different qualities. And I think there there is a sense among tech elites that whether you're a founder which is a pretty hallowed identity or an engineer or a venture capitalist you are part of this distinguished elite at the same time you know more traditional forms of identity like they are I think they are very conscious of their status that most of them are white males and they have chosen to think that DEI and any other diversity measures and also social justice movements that some of which try to write old wrongs against you for marginalized people are h are instead um a form of victimization or discrimination against white people like them.

And so in that way that they seem to feel like they're on the back foot and that their own identity is threatened, that it's not okay to be a a conservative white male. Um I I certainly don't think that's true and I think the proof is in uh how successful that they they've been but they feel like they sort of have to apolog the the the buying era having to apologize for who they are and now there's a sense that they can be proud of who they are again and part of that is considering themselves the sort of these elites the elect who can rule over the rest of us.

Got one last question for you here. Um, tech moguls as as we discussed have succeeded in not only limiting regulations for cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence. They're becoming more deeply embedded in the national security state and they lead the anti-dei sort of woke charge. What will they want in the years ahead?

Well, they're certainly looking to the government as uh a cash source. They want contracts with the government. They want, they know that a lot of money is going to be coming from there. It always has, but um given how right-wing tech leads have kind of circled around Trump and are populating his administration, they're now looking for big contracts. And I think that there's still going to be consumer-f facing companies, of course, and trying to sell their products to the public. But with something like the Stargate initiative, which is hundreds of billions of dollars being put into data centers for AI and computing, that that's a huge uh possibility for the tech industry. But now they're ve very proudly going back to working for the state, working for the security state. It's not just companies like Peter Teal's Palanteer, you know, it's Google, Microsoft, all the tech companies and also ones that are purpose-built to work for the uh defense and intelligence uh establishment like Andil.

Um so I think that's where they see their future now is um none of them are really libertarians in practice even if they sometimes claim to be in in in theory and they are much more willing to unite with the powers that be and to seek mutual profit and power there in a way that I think wouldn't have been acceptable kind of to the tech rank and file 10 or 15 years ago.