It’s one thing for individuals (particularly those without the means of paying) to pirate content that its original creators have already been compensated for and now exists to milk money for an IP holder for a century; it’s another matter entirely when AI companies with multi-billion dollar valuations scour the internet for content to include in their models to then profit from without permission from or compensation to the millions of people whose work they depend on.

The problem in there is corporations. AI is just the means of the dickery, not the cause.

I would also go further and say the root cause is capitalism, and that someone being able to eat or be housed should not be based on whether or not their art has met the criteria for corporate purchase. But I digress.

Yeah that's the thing: I don't believe it's wrong to profit from people's content without their permission, because I don't believe they own that content after they share it with humanity and I absolutely don't believe they should get to enforce that "ownership" via state violence. Everyone should get to use anything they want in derivative works, whether for profit or not. The fact that this could plausibly affect people's livelihoods (but IMO wouldn't; if there were significant profits in IP "theft" corporations would already be doing it) is a failure of capitalism and frankly not the reproducer's business.

The entire AI industry is built on IP theft; even if you don’t believe in IP ownership, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic rely on their ability to scrape the internet for content, with only largest of publishers having the resources to sue for anything in return.

So long as copyright is being enforced at the individual level for consumers, large corporations shouldn’t be allowed to get away with infringing on it for profit.

So long as copyright is being enforced at the individual level for consumers, large corporations shouldn't be allowed to get away with infringing on it for profit.

Sure, but my conclusion from that isn't "IP law should be enforced on the big corporations too;" it's "IP law should be abolished and also down with capitalism." Why should I want an unjust law to be enforced even more vigorously?

One of the big reasons IP law exists as it was to encourage people to not hide innovations and keep them secret to themselves. If anything you (not you specifically as a person) spend time and resources to create can be trivially taken away from you if people know about it, you then either have to keep it secret or you simply have no incentive to make anything new. Now if your argument is that current IP law has been totally perverted and abused to extreme levels and should be completely redone, you’ll get no argument from me. Just killing IP laws entirely would pretty much break our current society. Maybe out of that chaos would come something better, but make no mistake, shit would be fucked in the meantime.

AI training is data theft not IP theft

The data theft is another story, but there's clearly an IP theft angle to anti-AI arguments, as seen in the other person response.

His other comment applies just as easily to to stolen medical images, like this woman’s , as it does more creative works. It feels violating either way. Virtually no one is worried about Mickey Mouse appearing in data sets, but lots of people do feel wronged when their emails are trained on without permission or compensation, even though they’re not really IPs.

It can be both…

Yeah, it can be both, like, if you want to argue that in our current capitalist society people need to be compensated fairly for their work, I’ll hear that argument, but I don’t think it’s the best or most accurate framing. I think it’s just as obnoxious reddit made a deal with google to train on my (and everyone else’s) comments throughout the website as I do the possibility it was trained on my artwork, and I’m not alone in that.

I’m baffled I just downvoted a comment saying “intellectual property is bullshit”. There’s a first time for everything I guess. And yes it is bullshit but gosh, what a weird place to take that stance.

I mean, a key element of the anti-AI movement is that AI "steals" art, but I fundamentally believe in that art (and ideas) can't be owned and therefore can't be stolen. Ditto for code or what have you.