Joseph Gordon-Levitt wonders why AI companies don't have to 'follow any laws'

Big Tech never had to. In fact, they can pretty much make their own: "Terms and conditions may apply" (also the name of a great classic documentary on the subject by the way).

Also the fact that they have millions to bribe (or in friendlier terms "donate") their way out of anything, and have a network of very powerful friends and allies does not help at all.

Regulation should have started when the likes of Microsoft and Google started to become omnipotent and the big players in the Valley were not as powerful and influential as they are today. Now it's probably way too late.

I wonder this about the massive increase in crawlers too.

What happened to the computer misuse act? If I specifically state that my site is not to be crawled, via robots.txt and other mechanisms, why does continuously hammering it not count as illegitimate access? Do they need to breach some sign in / explicit t+c agreement for that to apply?

Because Capital has captured the legislature.

I didn't see any mention of this in the article, but: not sure if his wife is still on the board of OpenAI or not. He must have a unique and intimate view into some of this stuff and it's probably why they asked him about this stuff instead of another good actor. Big fan of his movies

You can use your eyes and rapidly "scan" troves of data as well to deep train your own personal model of self. You can observe and soak up ideas and iterate them as well. You can access any publicly facing data as well.

It's a good question, but please no "think of the children" argument which is being abused in other contexts.