CONCEPT
Exploitation (Young)
The structural transfer of labor's product from one group to another — not metaphorical wrongdoing but a precise institutional description of the AI training pipeline.
Exploitation, in Young's usage, means something more precise than 'being taken advantage of.' It refers to a structural process through which the labor of one group is systematically transferred to benefit another group, with the transfer built into the rules of the institutional arrangement. The exploited group does the work; the benefiting group captures a disproportionate share of the value. The classical case is capitalist wage labor; the new paradigmatic case is the AI training pipeline, which extracts value from the accumulated creative output of millions without consent or compensation and redistributes it to the platforms that trained the models.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The AI training pipeline satisfies every structural criterion of Young's exploitation. The creative workers produced the writing, images, code, and music that trained the models; the models now generate outputs that compete with the original labor; the value of that labor has been transferred — systematically, through institutional arrangements designed to facilitate the transfer — from creator to platform, from worker to shareholder.