After we speak about AI, we are inclined to give attention to outcomes: what it might do, the place it’s going, the way it’s outperforming people in job after job. However far much less consideration goes to what feeds these techniques — and what meaning for the individuals behind the info.
As a result of AI doesn’t simply study from info. It learns from us. From our language, our clicks, our routines, our creations. From posts scraped with out consent. From discussion board threads and pictures and even medical datasets many by no means knew have been getting used.
In 2024, The Atlantic revealed how a lot of its archive — going again a long time — was used with out authorization to coach business AI fashions. Reddit, StackOverflow, X (previously Twitter), and numerous boards adopted swimsuit. In Could 2024, a category motion lawsuit was filed in opposition to OpenAI for allegedly coaching ChatGPT on non-public knowledge, together with emails and chats, with out customers’ information or consent.
These are pressing copyright and digital consent points. A couple of information financial system more and more constructed not on participation, however extraction.
The Phantasm of “Decide-In”
We stay in a world the place most individuals by no means actively agreed to their knowledge coaching massive language fashions. However now, that knowledge is encoded, weighted, and regurgitated by means of AI instruments that form engines like google, hiring selections, advert focusing on, and even inventive industries.
It’s a quiet sort of dispossession: the normalization of being mined, modeled, and mimicked by techniques you don’t management and certain by no means will.
What We Threat Dropping
If AI turns into the dominant interface of the web — mediating what we see, how we work, and the way we talk — then who trains it, and the way, turns into a matter of energy.
When knowledge is centralized, historical past turns into editable and when techniques bear in mind every part, your freedom on-line begins to sound the hazard alarm.
That’s why AI literacy goes past how you can use instruments like ChatGPT or Midjourney and offers with the very boundaries that we, the individuals, the customers, are conscious of and vigilent sufficient to talk for.
Listed below are some frequent sense questions all of us ought to be asking:
Who owns the info AI learns from?Who decides which data is emphasised or erased?What rights do creators, educators, and residents have over their enter?Can AI be skilled on moral constraints — and who defines these ethics?
And most critically: what infrastructures are we constructing to help clear, decentralized, and self-determined fashions?
Our Place at SourceLess Labs Basis
We consider AI ought to serve human dignity, not override it. And that begins with infrastructure — the place id, knowledge, and computation will not be trapped in walled gardens.
This is the reason SourceLess builds:
Non-public computation frameworks the place AI brokers function transparently and serve their customers, not simply the businesses behind them.Verifiable digital identities by means of STR.Domains, the place the person owns their credentials — moveable, encrypted, and never issued by a third-party app.Decentralized studying and collaboration areas — so creators and educators aren’t pressured to commerce privateness for entry.
We consider human literacy on this new period should embrace infrastructural consciousness not simply how you can use instruments, however how they’re made, maintained, and monetized.
As a result of in the long run, the techniques we practice will replicate not simply our inputs however our intentions.
