Capitalists have found a way to extract vast profits out of content theft and plagiarism, so they've completely changed their tune on intellectual property and content theft
Unfortunately, this is the way things have been going for decades. The theft of money from the rest of us has descended into the ease of 'assisted suicude' and also abortion up to birth. The theft and plagiarism of intellectual property by the powerful and wealthy is just the neo feudalism we have been living under for 40 or so years. It has mostly affected the poor, the low paid, the disabled and the marginalised until recent times. Now it looks like it may or wil affect the lives and livelihoods of the middle classes. Some of us saw the writing on the wall many years ago. The idea of some toerag stealing another person's song or story or painting and earning money from something they didn't create themselves but have stolen it and then are protected by spurious laws is the thinnest end of the wedge. What comes next? Perhaps only when they replace middle class jobs with AI or robots will more people speak out. I don't really know. But I do know one thing, this is a completely cynical, illegal, unjust and even amoral decision. We don't live in a democracy anymore. I'd call it seriously a corruptocracy. I'm a person with a long term health issue and already struggle financially and I am a prospective published author and I do not like the idea of my work being stolen by anyone. Why would I? I am also a practising Christian and I see this government and the last Tory one as bordering on evil.
Theft is theft when you take a creation from someone's brain. Such as a poem, a painting, a song, a story, a weaving, a quilt, a sculpture, engraving, design. It is a new image, you are claiming for your own use.
Unlike a photograph, which is not theft, however inspiring in its setting.
Once published, displayed, heard, protected by copyright, the creator of art owns that creativity, and whatever value it might bring them, through sale of the original or of copies.
The idea that a computerised copy could select ideas from protected sources and use them without recompense to the creator in the interests of capitalist business and faster production does not escape the verdict of theft, since it is stealing those created ideas for profit.
Starmer and government are backing, again, theft from workers.
I almost completely agree with your comment except with regard to photography. To argue that somehow there is no creative input in photography, that being in a place, seeing it or it's people, environment, context and capturing that is not art is to totally undermine the rest of your argument. The tools may differ but the intellectual input, the "being there"and the care and thought to educate, entertain and amaze, is also derived from someone's brain. In addition it may have escaped your notice that photographs can be copyrighted just as images, far more difficult to copyright are things like weavings, quits, lace design etc. So lets not water down the angst that arises from the theft of all creative work not matter what the tools that are employed to produce it.
I took Liz's comment to mean that the original photographer wasn't plagiarising the scene they were photographing rather than it was alright to reproduce their photograph.
As a former proofreader for a university print office, I am aware of photographers' rights on copyrighting, and that they, very sensibly, do so. However, my point was regarding creativity in the content, not the skills employed in capturing the image, locating the place and environment. Those are indeed skills which deserve protection from AI, as theft from copyrighted photographs is still theft! I have fabric art and photograph art that hangs on my walls at home, I don't consider one deserves less praise or respect than the other. My wording, as Alan has suggested, wasn't as clear as it could have been- sorry!
People stopped understanding what meaning is and how to detect meaning and how to tell apart meaningful content from demagogy. I see the problem in people losing ability to distinguish machine content from human creation. They themselves think like AI.
Just To amuse me this is Chat GPT - Prompted "Give me a 2 paragraph rebuttal to this please?"
"While concerns about the misuse of AI are valid, the portrayal of AI development as a reckless, lawless enterprise ignores the substantial efforts underway to build ethical, transparent, and accountable systems. Many leading AI companies are actively engaging with researchers, regulators, and civil society to create standards around data provenance, watermarking of AI-generated content, and safe deployment practices. Moreover, the claim that AI is inherently polluting its own training data over time presumes a static or careless approach to model training, when in fact there is ongoing innovation in filtering, synthetic data quality control, and human-in-the-loop feedback to maintain high standards.
Additionally, characterizing AI as a wholesale threat to creative industries overlooks the collaborative opportunities emerging between artists and AI tools. From assisting writers and musicians to enabling accessibility and translation, AI is being used to enhance human creativity—not replace it. The economic pessimism expressed in the article discounts the productivity and innovation gains that AI can offer when implemented thoughtfully. Dismissing AI as “slop” risks ignoring the nuances of both the technology and the human agency involved in shaping its impact.
We heard similar things with privatisation. It would be more efficient, wouldn't take any money from the taxpayers and it would be cheaper. Ho hum. Hows that going with Thames Water, gas, electricity and other privatised industries? Pessimism is the consequence of being lied to so that vast profits could be made and then offshored in tax havens. Thames Water is £60 billion in debt and a huge chunk of that was because of loans raised against the company to pay shareholders and CEOs huge salaries and bonuses. Pardon me if I do not fully trust powerful and wealthy people when they say 'trust us'.
I'm not sure I find the privatisation comparison particularly strong—unless you were commenting more on trust than making a direct comparison?
To me, it feels like we're entering a new period of flux, more like the mechanisation of the early 20th century or the first computer revolution in the 1980s. Both of those transformations created big winners and significant losers. But it’s undeniable that, over time, they led to massive productivity gains and ultimately made the majority better off.
I hope the same will be true of AI—but only time will tell.
Of course, I could be wrong and end up an unwilling slave to an AI overlord named Garry, Chief Algorithmic Overlord and Spreadsheet Dictator - Best Sam
Yes, you've qualified your statement there, and I agree with you. It's the idea that people under the guise of 'educating' AI can effectively incorporate, a politer word than theft(?), other people's work without even a nod or a wink let alone recognition or payment that if not worrying is extremely irksome. When we had decades of 'do not pirate this DVD' and suddenly there is a sea change because some people smell money or power is not good. And yes, there is an issue of trust amongst other things. Governments should not have or wield such power imho on behalf of themselves or anyone else.
I don’t have a creative bone in my body and haven’t produced anything worth stealing—frankly, they’re more than welcome to take my dissertation (it was shit). So I feel like I should bow out of this debate. I haven’t had anything stolen, and I don’t really have much skin in the game.
That said, I am a massive user of AI, and I find it incredibly useful—it’s genuinely transformed the way I work. I suspect that, when it comes to the AI debate, I’m probably too influenced by its utility to be truly impartial and its best I go and sit in the park with a beer. All the best Sam
This article is about half interesting points and half wildly incorrect. It makes sense if you look at all business and gov as one block. There are only a half dozen AI companies though which are using this data. I'm pretty sure 95% of the capitalist world are still fuming about their product being stolen and fed into the machine. It's a fun zinger, but not a cohesive picture.
I am no fan of Starmer, but not seeing from this article why its concluded that he thinks this will save the economy?
Other cliches about ai giving wrong references or saying defamatory lies about people are just confusing why they keep coming up. We all agree ai is not up to the task, it is not to be trusted with accuracy or any task that has consequences. But then constantly try to frame the discussion around acting surprised that it repeatedly proves it so. It is only a tool to augment your tasks, not replace them, and if you try to do that just because it has a natural language interface, then you are the same idiot that would have been making other basic mistakes without ai.
This has been a trillion dollar theft and fraud called innovation. I have been stating this for years and years. All it is a crime wave sanctioned by our elected officials /bureaucrats by the "silly-con-valley bros. The copyright system has been shafted so these aliens could rip off all of the human knowledge published. The social media terms of service allowed all the of the human output to be given to these criminals. So it has been a coalition of thievery globally. This is no accident! It has been systemic and full of collusion.
As a disabled and chronically ill artist who is unable to work at any sort of commercially viable level in literally any job, it's darkly funny to me that they're obsessed with taking away the benefits I need to survive (in poverty) while simultaneously happily cheering on the death of the only industry I'm able to make a few pence in occasionally by selling the artwork that takes me months to complete, but is now much harder to sell because you can get a shit version for free or not much (if you're not counting the environmental cost) from the AI plagiarism machine, and the shitbags who use it to undercut real artists.
If anyone thinks AI will help the economy they're living in a fantasy world. If less people have jobs the less tax is coming in, the more AI the fewer real jobs the less tax coming in. If any government thinks AI will help they'll soon find out that AI companies will fight to pay less tax on their vast profits because governments give to much leeway to companies over the working people.
It's crazy when you think about it, the tech guys working on AI will soon be without a job because they are teaching AI how to steal other people's work and that means they are teaching them to learn and grow the abilities to take over all worker's jobs, which will include that of the tech guys building the AI because the companies will stop hiring them.
So no workers for taxes, and maybe sooner than you think no people in government because the AI people will soon take that over as well, and the fools in government are helping them towards such a happening.
Remember how how the banking changed when it became AI we had to deal with. Think of everything being run by AI, which means the guys who own the tech because they want to be top of the heap and can only do that by, eventually, turning AI into government that only allows what the tech guys have fed into it.
Unfortunately, this is the way things have been going for decades. The theft of money from the rest of us has descended into the ease of 'assisted suicude' and also abortion up to birth. The theft and plagiarism of intellectual property by the powerful and wealthy is just the neo feudalism we have been living under for 40 or so years. It has mostly affected the poor, the low paid, the disabled and the marginalised until recent times. Now it looks like it may or wil affect the lives and livelihoods of the middle classes. Some of us saw the writing on the wall many years ago. The idea of some toerag stealing another person's song or story or painting and earning money from something they didn't create themselves but have stolen it and then are protected by spurious laws is the thinnest end of the wedge. What comes next? Perhaps only when they replace middle class jobs with AI or robots will more people speak out. I don't really know. But I do know one thing, this is a completely cynical, illegal, unjust and even amoral decision. We don't live in a democracy anymore. I'd call it seriously a corruptocracy. I'm a person with a long term health issue and already struggle financially and I am a prospective published author and I do not like the idea of my work being stolen by anyone. Why would I? I am also a practising Christian and I see this government and the last Tory one as bordering on evil.
Theft is theft when you take a creation from someone's brain. Such as a poem, a painting, a song, a story, a weaving, a quilt, a sculpture, engraving, design. It is a new image, you are claiming for your own use.
Unlike a photograph, which is not theft, however inspiring in its setting.
Once published, displayed, heard, protected by copyright, the creator of art owns that creativity, and whatever value it might bring them, through sale of the original or of copies.
The idea that a computerised copy could select ideas from protected sources and use them without recompense to the creator in the interests of capitalist business and faster production does not escape the verdict of theft, since it is stealing those created ideas for profit.
Starmer and government are backing, again, theft from workers.
I almost completely agree with your comment except with regard to photography. To argue that somehow there is no creative input in photography, that being in a place, seeing it or it's people, environment, context and capturing that is not art is to totally undermine the rest of your argument. The tools may differ but the intellectual input, the "being there"and the care and thought to educate, entertain and amaze, is also derived from someone's brain. In addition it may have escaped your notice that photographs can be copyrighted just as images, far more difficult to copyright are things like weavings, quits, lace design etc. So lets not water down the angst that arises from the theft of all creative work not matter what the tools that are employed to produce it.
I took Liz's comment to mean that the original photographer wasn't plagiarising the scene they were photographing rather than it was alright to reproduce their photograph.
As a former proofreader for a university print office, I am aware of photographers' rights on copyrighting, and that they, very sensibly, do so. However, my point was regarding creativity in the content, not the skills employed in capturing the image, locating the place and environment. Those are indeed skills which deserve protection from AI, as theft from copyrighted photographs is still theft! I have fabric art and photograph art that hangs on my walls at home, I don't consider one deserves less praise or respect than the other. My wording, as Alan has suggested, wasn't as clear as it could have been- sorry!
People stopped understanding what meaning is and how to detect meaning and how to tell apart meaningful content from demagogy. I see the problem in people losing ability to distinguish machine content from human creation. They themselves think like AI.
Just To amuse me this is Chat GPT - Prompted "Give me a 2 paragraph rebuttal to this please?"
"While concerns about the misuse of AI are valid, the portrayal of AI development as a reckless, lawless enterprise ignores the substantial efforts underway to build ethical, transparent, and accountable systems. Many leading AI companies are actively engaging with researchers, regulators, and civil society to create standards around data provenance, watermarking of AI-generated content, and safe deployment practices. Moreover, the claim that AI is inherently polluting its own training data over time presumes a static or careless approach to model training, when in fact there is ongoing innovation in filtering, synthetic data quality control, and human-in-the-loop feedback to maintain high standards.
Additionally, characterizing AI as a wholesale threat to creative industries overlooks the collaborative opportunities emerging between artists and AI tools. From assisting writers and musicians to enabling accessibility and translation, AI is being used to enhance human creativity—not replace it. The economic pessimism expressed in the article discounts the productivity and innovation gains that AI can offer when implemented thoughtfully. Dismissing AI as “slop” risks ignoring the nuances of both the technology and the human agency involved in shaping its impact.
We heard similar things with privatisation. It would be more efficient, wouldn't take any money from the taxpayers and it would be cheaper. Ho hum. Hows that going with Thames Water, gas, electricity and other privatised industries? Pessimism is the consequence of being lied to so that vast profits could be made and then offshored in tax havens. Thames Water is £60 billion in debt and a huge chunk of that was because of loans raised against the company to pay shareholders and CEOs huge salaries and bonuses. Pardon me if I do not fully trust powerful and wealthy people when they say 'trust us'.
Hi Tom,
I'm not sure I find the privatisation comparison particularly strong—unless you were commenting more on trust than making a direct comparison?
To me, it feels like we're entering a new period of flux, more like the mechanisation of the early 20th century or the first computer revolution in the 1980s. Both of those transformations created big winners and significant losers. But it’s undeniable that, over time, they led to massive productivity gains and ultimately made the majority better off.
I hope the same will be true of AI—but only time will tell.
Of course, I could be wrong and end up an unwilling slave to an AI overlord named Garry, Chief Algorithmic Overlord and Spreadsheet Dictator - Best Sam
Yes, you've qualified your statement there, and I agree with you. It's the idea that people under the guise of 'educating' AI can effectively incorporate, a politer word than theft(?), other people's work without even a nod or a wink let alone recognition or payment that if not worrying is extremely irksome. When we had decades of 'do not pirate this DVD' and suddenly there is a sea change because some people smell money or power is not good. And yes, there is an issue of trust amongst other things. Governments should not have or wield such power imho on behalf of themselves or anyone else.
I don’t have a creative bone in my body and haven’t produced anything worth stealing—frankly, they’re more than welcome to take my dissertation (it was shit). So I feel like I should bow out of this debate. I haven’t had anything stolen, and I don’t really have much skin in the game.
That said, I am a massive user of AI, and I find it incredibly useful—it’s genuinely transformed the way I work. I suspect that, when it comes to the AI debate, I’m probably too influenced by its utility to be truly impartial and its best I go and sit in the park with a beer. All the best Sam
What a very good choice! It's good to debate with you. Enjoy your beer!
Is there no capitalist cliché that this administration will not latch onto? Shame on them.
This article is about half interesting points and half wildly incorrect. It makes sense if you look at all business and gov as one block. There are only a half dozen AI companies though which are using this data. I'm pretty sure 95% of the capitalist world are still fuming about their product being stolen and fed into the machine. It's a fun zinger, but not a cohesive picture.
I am no fan of Starmer, but not seeing from this article why its concluded that he thinks this will save the economy?
Other cliches about ai giving wrong references or saying defamatory lies about people are just confusing why they keep coming up. We all agree ai is not up to the task, it is not to be trusted with accuracy or any task that has consequences. But then constantly try to frame the discussion around acting surprised that it repeatedly proves it so. It is only a tool to augment your tasks, not replace them, and if you try to do that just because it has a natural language interface, then you are the same idiot that would have been making other basic mistakes without ai.
This has been a trillion dollar theft and fraud called innovation. I have been stating this for years and years. All it is a crime wave sanctioned by our elected officials /bureaucrats by the "silly-con-valley bros. The copyright system has been shafted so these aliens could rip off all of the human knowledge published. The social media terms of service allowed all the of the human output to be given to these criminals. So it has been a coalition of thievery globally. This is no accident! It has been systemic and full of collusion.
https://akcidentalwriter.substack.com/p/ai-a-global-criminal-enterprise
As a disabled and chronically ill artist who is unable to work at any sort of commercially viable level in literally any job, it's darkly funny to me that they're obsessed with taking away the benefits I need to survive (in poverty) while simultaneously happily cheering on the death of the only industry I'm able to make a few pence in occasionally by selling the artwork that takes me months to complete, but is now much harder to sell because you can get a shit version for free or not much (if you're not counting the environmental cost) from the AI plagiarism machine, and the shitbags who use it to undercut real artists.
If anyone thinks AI will help the economy they're living in a fantasy world. If less people have jobs the less tax is coming in, the more AI the fewer real jobs the less tax coming in. If any government thinks AI will help they'll soon find out that AI companies will fight to pay less tax on their vast profits because governments give to much leeway to companies over the working people.
It's crazy when you think about it, the tech guys working on AI will soon be without a job because they are teaching AI how to steal other people's work and that means they are teaching them to learn and grow the abilities to take over all worker's jobs, which will include that of the tech guys building the AI because the companies will stop hiring them.
So no workers for taxes, and maybe sooner than you think no people in government because the AI people will soon take that over as well, and the fools in government are helping them towards such a happening.
Remember how how the banking changed when it became AI we had to deal with. Think of everything being run by AI, which means the guys who own the tech because they want to be top of the heap and can only do that by, eventually, turning AI into government that only allows what the tech guys have fed into it.