this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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I think there are dozens of good reasons to criticize the AI bubble, but 'stealing IP' is the weakest one in my opinion.
Most people seem to have no problem with piracy, for example.
Heck, in the early 2000s the free culture movement and Pirate Parties were gaining steam to reform the draconian copyright laws we have.
The problem is not stealing IP. It's Big Tech getting away with laws while the rest of us are punished.
The issue is their reframing of reality to gaslight the entire world. All of the media cannot be in the hands of the few. We used to have monopoly laws against this shit.
I feel like there’s a big difference between grabbing some music that I might actually pay for later if it’s ever available DRM free and downloading the sum total of human creation in order to sell that creativity back to those same people for a profit.
But my biggest issue is the hypocrisy, these companies who are using generative AI for their scripts and their CG are the same ones that were suing the pants off of people 20 years ago for even thinking about pirating shit.
No. The problem of AI is because of surveillance state, the end of personal computing, deep fakes, rising electricity costs due to data centers, and death of open knowledge.
AI companies would rather sell you intelligence to keep their bottom line and websites blocking archiving services due to AI (ex: internet archve)
These two were coming way before showed AI, so I don't think AI's to blame here, just the typical technofeudal mindset of not wanting the serfs to own anything
Anyone I talk to about this agrees that the IP theft itself is not a problem but the difference in punishment between the big tech companies and the average person. If someone in a basement had made chatGPT or equivalent, they'd have been put in prison for life, or fined into oblivion. OpenAI does it and suddenly one of the richest companies in the world says "if anyone even thinks about suing or holding them to account we will defend them with our literal army of lawyers". Then China does it and suddenly IP matters again.
The secret is that the laws are all bullshit, intended to control the average person, not because anyone in power actually cares about the violations themselves.
Most people in the world never faced any serious threat of jail time for copyright infringement. The absurd punishments handed down to average users is purely an American thing.
The contrast against the weirdly punitive American justice system is not the problem with AI companies.
The reality of the situation is that copyright is and always has been a horseshit system for its purpose. The entire concept of "property" is one that applies to physical goods, that are in limited supply. It does not apply to things that are abundant and ubiquitous, i.e. no one owns the air because the air is wildly abundant and everywhere.
Information: music, art, storytelling, is not physical matter. Unlike physical matter, a story can be instantly copied by as many people as can hear it, because information does not obey the same scaling laws as physical matter. Vinyls and recording equipment started exposing how infinitely copiable information is, and computers and the internet really drove that point home.
Copyright though, has always been a dumb fucking system that hamfistedly tries to apply the ownership laws of physical properties to that of information. It does so by forcing artificial scarcity on that information and creating all of these walls and systems to maintain that scarcity.
Copyright has never been fit for purpose, and the better we get at processing information, the more evident that becomes.
AI companies are problematic because they are literally burning huge amounts of resources to replace humans while there are no mechanisms in most societies to ensure humans still get resources if the robots are better than them. That's the actual problem with AI companies, and it's fundamentally a problem with capitalism.
Tell that to all the artists who are finding themselves in the training data, a lot of musicians are now finding themselves in those data. Calling it stealing IP is a bit of a misnomer, since that only really cares about the copyright holders, they are outright stealing culture from us
it's also the scale of it and the profiteering from it.
Just think of all the predatory letters sent to ISPs because some kid downloaded the Avengers movie off a piracy website. And at the same time companies like Google have the balls to sell access to models that stole…literally everything in digital existence.
Way too many pirates have started sounding like Lars Ulrich since this AI bubble started.
NYT is still a dog shit pro-genocide publication. I think people are just waking up to the fact that mainstream media organizations overwhelmingly represent the Epstein-class and not the average American.