DeepSeek faces backlash for exploiting AI expertise without consent

In recent months, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek has caused significant disruptions in the financial market by allegedly training its artificial intelligence model on the foundational model developed by OpenAI, without proper consent or acknowledgment. This accusation has raised serious concerns around the ethical use of AI and the economic implications of such practices. Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has been under scrutiny for reportedly appropriating data from various sources—news articles, stories, and YouTube video transcriptions—to enhance its models, often without compensating the original creators of this data. This situation points to a broader issue where companies are utilizing generative AI technologies not to enhance human creativity or storytelling capabilities, but rather to produce content in a quicker and more cost-effective manner. These practices have sparked a heated debate regarding the displacement of human workers, who are being replaced by tools enhanced by their own labor. There is a growing concern that this trend could exacerbate existing inequalities in the labor market and lead to a significant erosion in job quality. The issue has not gone unnoticed at international AI safety summits including those held in the United Kingdom, South Korea, and France, where the focus has primarily been on existential risks associated with AI, such as the potential for it to create biological weapons or enable new cyberattacks. However, economic risks—particularly those involving the extraction of worker expertise—are becoming increasingly relevant. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has actively advocated against the use of AI for writing or rewriting literary works, emphasizing that AI-generated content should not be treated as valid source material. Such measures aim to ensure that writers receive due credit for their original creations. Economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson underline that the problematic use of AI, as evidenced in cases like DeepSeek and OpenAI, is not promoting shared productivity but instead leading to stagnant wages and growing inequality. The dynamic raises pivotal questions about how companies will choose to utilize the power of AI moving forward: Will they leverage it to elevate human skill and talent, or will they exploit it for their own corporate gain at the expense of workers? As this landscape evolves, it is imperative for policymakers and the media to address these economic ramifications of AI thoughtfully, ensuring that the dialog surrounding AI includes the rights and welfare of the human creators behind the data and labor that fuel these systems.