Editorial: Zenia Stampe's necessary reckoning with the tech elite over AI

This editorial from the Danish engineering outlet Ingeniøren, written on behalf of its editorial board, defends Culture Minister Zenia Stampe (Radikale Venstre) after a heated AI debate on DR's programme Debatten. It argues that her confrontation with the tech elite was necessary.

In the programme, Stampe voiced deep concern about how to handle AI's potentially society-changing effects. She said the large language models are trained on most of the knowledge humanity has produced over centuries, which can fool users into thinking they are very clever. Entrepreneur Martin Thorborg, former head of the accounting software firm Dinero, reacted angrily. He said she knew little about technology, that he had worked with it for 30 years, and that his AI had been trained on 20,000 of his emails and five of his books. Stampe replied that he had not built the model himself, that such models are often trained on protected works without permission, and that it is not his genius that lets him write a book in a month. She called him self-overvaluing. She also told Michael Dyrby, head of the AI-driven outlet Y, that she was unimpressed and called journalism of that kind "plattenslageri", or swindling.

The editorial says Stampe is right that many people worry the world's richest tech companies built AI largely on stolen material, while those same bosses stand to profit if AI transforms the public sector, education, the economy and the labour market. It says the hard part of knowledge is the creative process of experimenting and testing hypotheses against reality, and asks whether society should reward the thief.

It notes that Thorborg later told TV2 he was "shaken", and argues that a male minister would not have been called "hysterical" or described as having a "mental meltdown". It says Europe's "technological sleeping beauty slumber" has left it fully dependent on American and Chinese IT infrastructure. It lists further questions about AI: surveillance, free will under constant profiling, and whether democracy can survive a handful of men controlling AI. It concludes that Europe must build more of the technology itself and resist the view that the future is already fixed.