Chutzpah

As always, Yiddish has a word for it, and the word is chutzpah.

Chutzpah means extreme self-confidence and audacity, but there's more to it than that.  There's a cheekiness to it, an in-your face, scornful sense of "I dare you even to try to do something about this."  As writer Leo Rosten put it, "Chutzpah is the guy who killed both of his parents and then appealed to the judge for mercy because he's an orphan."

The reason this comes up is, unsurprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg, who raises chutzpah to the level of performance art.  This time it's because of his interview last week with The Verge, which looked at his company Meta's embrace of AI -- and his sneering attitude toward the creative people whose work is being stolen to train it, and without which the entire enterprise wouldn't even get off the ground.  When asked about whether this was fair or ethical, Zuckerberg basically said that the question was irrelevant, because if someone objected, their work was of little worth anyhow.

"I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this," Zuckerberg said.  "My guess is that there are going to be certain partnerships that get made when content is really important and valuable.  But if creators are concerned or object, when push comes to shove, if they demanded that we don’t use their content, then we just wouldn’t use their content.  It’s not like that’s going to change the outcome of this stuff that much...  I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over.  When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it?"

In other words: if you ask Meta not to use your intellectual property, they'll comply.  But not because it's the right thing to do.  It's because there are tens of thousands of other artists, photographers, and writers out there to fuck over.  Anything accessible on the internet is fair game -- once again, not because it's legal or ethical, but because (1) most of the time the creator doesn't know their material is being used for free, and (2) even if they find out, few creative people have the resources to sue Mark Zuckerberg.

He can just shrug his shoulders and say "fine, then," because there's a ton of other people out there to exploit.

Chutzpah.

Add to this an article that also appeared last week, this time over at CNN, and which adds insult to injury.  This one is about how Zuckerberg is now the fourth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of around two hundred billion dollars.

Let me put that in perspective for you.  Assuming no further increase in his net worth, if Mark Zuckerberg gave away a million dollars every single day, he would finally run out in 548 years.

Because of all this, it's only with deep reluctance that I still participate in Meta-owned social media sites like Facebook and Instagram.  Removing myself from them would cut me off completely, not only from opportunities to market my work, but from friends I seldom get a chance to see in person.  What are my other options?  The Elon Musk-owned far-right-wing cesspool formerly known as Twitter?  TikTok, which stands a fair chance of being shut down in the United States because of allegations of data mining by China?  I'm on Bluesky, but I'm damned if I can figure out how to get any traction there -- most of my posts get ignored completely.

You gotta give Zuckerberg one thing; he knows how to back people into a corner.

I know some of my bitterness over all this is how hard I've worked as a writer, and how little recompense I've ever gotten.  I've written Skeptophilia for twelve years, have over five and a half million lifetime hits on the site, and other than some kind donations (for which I will always be grateful) haven't made a damn thing from it.  I have twenty-odd novels in print, through two different traditional publishers and a handful that are self-published, and have never netted more than five hundred dollars a year from them.  I'll own some of this; I absolutely suck at marketing and self-promotion, largely because it was hammered into me as a child that being proud of, or even talking about, my accomplishments was "conceit," an attitude I've never really recovered from.  And fine, I'm willing even to accept that maybe I have an over-inflated sense of my own skill as a writer and how much I should expect to make.

So fair enough: I should admit the possibility that I haven't succeeded as a writer because I'm not good enough to deserve success.

And I could leave it there, except for the fact that I'm not alone.  As part of the writing community, I can name without even trying hard two dozen exceptionally talented, hard-working writers who struggle to sell enough books to make it worth their time.  They keep going only because they love storytelling and are really good at it.  Just about all of them have day jobs so they can pay the mortgage and buy food.

Maybe I can't be unbiased about my own writing, but I'll be damned if I'll accept that all of us are creating work that isn't "important or valuable."

So the fact is, AI will continue to steal the work of people like me, who can ill afford to lose the income, and assholes like Mark Zuckerberg will continue to accrue wealth at levels somewhere way beyond astronomical, all the while thumbing their noses at us simply because they can.  The only solution is one I've proposed before; stop using AI.  Completely.  Yes, there are undoubtedly ways it could be used ethically, but at the moment, it's not, and it won't be until the techbros see enough people opting out that the message will get hammered home.

But until then, my personal message to Mark Zuckerberg is a resounding "fuck you, you obnoxious, arrogant putz."  The last word of which, by the way, is also Yiddish.  If you don't know it, I'll leave it to you to research its meaning.

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