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Comment by shkkmo | Hacker News Reader

> This is so weird. They are mad that they didn't get paid for voluntarily participating in a program that never offered any pay?

Companies have been getting ever bolder about abusing volunteer and crowd sourced labor. When the participants are bound by strict NDAs, I think some skepticism is in order.

All we really can tell is that non-neglibigle percentage of the participants in a limited access program were creeped out enough to be willing to blow up their access to call attention to it.

I don't think this story is really even about AI at all, but about labor practices.

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How is it possible to "abuse" volunteer labor? Can't they just... stop volunteering?

The same way you can abuse paid labor, "can't they just quit?"

I think that's quite different, though. If someone is currently doing paid labor, they indeed can't just quit in most cases, because they depend on the income.

But there's no such thing with volunteering to try a new service. That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?

Unless those artists depended on (free) access to the model for monetization purposes. There have been some AI videos popping up in Youtube and other platforms. Creating a video using traditional CGI techniques is many orders of magnitudes more work than writing (even pages of) prompts.

To that, I will add that there is a large market for content outside mainstream media[^1]. I'm sure there are creative folk out there which are not visual artists as their main thing[^2], but can use cheap visual art coming from AI to generate some sort of income...

[^1]: See, for example, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-an...

They aren't free to post videos they generated with sora. It must be reviewed before hand

> That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?

It's an emerging technology and platform. There are economic advantages to having early access to learn what it can do.

Furthermore, this specific colunteer program appears to have an associated contest that pays creators who win. Thus you have a lot of volunteers, limited under NDA, being pushed to compete for vert limited renumeration for their efforts. I doubt most of the volunteers are bored people doing it as a hobby.

In that case the paid labor loses their livelihood.

What do they lose when they weren't being paid in the first place?

Not really a reasonable comparison - paid labour is more likely linked to income that is used for basic necessities, whereas volunteering implies freely offering to take part in an enterprise/task - thus no consequence for just choosing not to partake. Honestly seems like a bit of an emotional overreaction.

Volunteers can be abused in many of the same ways employees can be. In general, if a volunteer at a for profit compan is doing work that benefits that company, this can be considered "competing" with paid employees and mean the volunteer position must also be paid

It’s a company that has raised billions, they can afford to pay for labor.

That's not how markets work though. If someone is willing to do it for free, and you are happy with what that person produces, why would a company pay them anyway?

> why would a company pay them anyway?

Because we have laws to protect workers. You can't just not pay an employee and call them a volunteer as a for profit company.

There a legal limitations on what a for profit company can do with volunteer labor but companies have been increasingly bold about pushing those limits.

Often times it is hard to tell if a program violates those limits since particpants are put under strict NDAs.

That sounds like a definitional problem though. If a person is choosing to volunteer are they really an employee?

I general don't agree with NDAs though, so on that front we definitely agree there's an issue there. Especially for a volunteer, I would never sign an NDA when I'm volunteering my time and effort.

By the time the volunteer quits due to abuse, it's too late. If Mr asshole goes off and yells a bunch of obscenities at someone, sure, they can respond by quitting, but they've already been yelled at and called a bunch of names.

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