The Borrowers

In a conversation at Stanford with Erik Brynjolfsson (one of the guys who pushed the automation scare of the mid-2010s that proved way overblown), [Eric] Schmidt said he hoped all the attendees would become entrepreneurs and gave an example of how generative AI would be able to help them (one that, once again, vastly overstates what these tools can do). 

He told the students that if TikTok gets banned, they should tell a large language model to make a TikTok clone and steal all the user-generated content and music on TikTok to populate their new platform —something he said would take no more than a minute —then launch it for the world to use.

Surely, someone would notice the platform was built on stolen content, but Schmidt has the solution: “If it took off, then you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up,” because “If nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.” 

When reminded by Brynjolfsson he was on camera, Schmidt reiterated that “Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.”

If nothing else, the casual way Schmidt can discuss breaking the rules on such an enormous scale shows just how much Silicon Valley needs to be held to account.