What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.
It's entitled for others to believe they have any say in what happens with the work of others. The world without these protections would be worse off by far. What I gather from what you are saying is that if I write a song, or a book, anyone else should be able to take what I've done and make their own money off it. By that logic, a publisher wouldn't need to compensate writers. Record executives wouldn't need to compensate musicians. Whoever holds the means for extracting value are at a huge permanent advantage.
We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.
Copyright is literally the granting of monopolies. That's the whole point of it.
Copyright benefits huge corporations way more than "the little guy." The biggest holders of copyrights and patents are huge corporations, many of which are often bought explicitly for the purpose of warding off competition from new upstarts.
These huge companies (e.g. Disney) also use their massive war chests to lobby the government into extending copyright terms. What used to just be 14 years of a limited monopoly has now been extended to hundreds of years. They're quite literally capturing and monopolizing the value.
When you look at what the average person does, generally speaking, it has little to do with patents and copyrights. The massive amount of creation and creativity we've seen online, with people riffing on art, music, video, code, etc., has largely involved infringing on copyrights held by the rich and powerful, and hoping to god we don't get sued.
Meaning:
(1) Copyright is in no way necessary for encouraging creativity, which was its original mandate. The evidence is in, and people create and innovate a ton without needing to have some sort of monopoly on everything they do.
(2) Far from protecting the little guy from the big guy, copyright has done the exact opposite, given the big guys huge legal recourse to sue little guys into oblivion, block innovation, block competition, and profit forever.
"The means of production" is an antiquated idea. Look at the reality on the ground. Producing and distributing has never been easier, never been more available to the masses, never been more popular. Big companies do not have a monopoly on the means. This whole copyright nonsense is an idea from the days when the printing press was a new invention, and the average person couldn't print. That's no longer true today.
Also, just from a theory perspective, we never made it so that you can copyright and patent recipes, no matter how creative they are. And yet, mom and pop restaurants have always flourished. Copyrights aren't enforced heavily in the software industry. In fact, just the opposite: we have open source. And yet, individual developers can thrive. This idea that without copyright, big companies are just going to steal everything from the little guy and the little guy will have no chance is just not true. The places where you see that happening the most are the places that have the strongest copyright protections, e.g. the music industry, the publishing industry, etc.
You say means of production is an antiquated idea, but the world you are using as an example of the idea being unnecessary is a world where copyright exists. The world would look very different otherwise, and you can actually get a sneak peek of what would happen by looking at AI companies. These are not people using ingenuity to capture value that no else bothered to. They are owners of massive capital training for free on everyone's work to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't, but to replace them outright.
"Training on other people's work" has always been free for anyone to do for the entire history of humanity, and that shouldn't change. You do not get paid just because somebody read your work and learned from it, nor should you, unless you want to gatekeep it and charge for access.
As Jefferson said, "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
> …to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't…
So what? Big companies can do things that little companies can't. That's always been true and always will be true. What does this have to do with copyright?
> …but to replace them outright
Computers replaced jobs. Cars replaced jobs. AI is replacing jobs. Etc. So what? What does this have to do with copyright?
An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process, and ideas are not protected by copyright in the first place.
Your point was that people that create something valuable are not entitled to stop others from capturing the value of their creation, ostensibly because they “don’t want to do the hard work.” My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it. In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?
Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function. AI still needs people doing the work that it is displacing, but it strips the economic incentive to do it.
> An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process
How is it different in a way that's relevant here?
> My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it.
That's not true. Millions of entrepreneurs every year create companies, and do hard work, and capture value, without having to rely on copyrights/patents.
> In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?
In a different world, things would be different. So? That doesn't mean that world would be worse.
For example, imagine a world where recipes are patentable. The inventor of pizza would own Pizza, Inc., and no one else on earth would be allowed to make or sell pizza. It would be their intellectual property. And Disney would buy up tons of food patents and own an exclusive license to make french fries and cookies and milkshakes. And someone in that world would ask the same question you're asking, "Omg, without recipe patents, Gil Bates never would've been able to start Spaghetti, Inc., because The Olive Garden would've just been allowed to make spaghetti, too! What a nightmare!" But here we are, living in a universe where everyone can make spaghetti, and no one else has the right to tell other people they're not allowed to make spaghetti just because some other guy did it first. And it's just fine.
> Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function.
Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?
I suppose if Spaghetti Inc and Olive Garden were in the business of creating and licensing recipes, they would both be in trouble. But they are selling labor and ingredients, which is what people are paying for. Also, pizza and spaghetti have been around a long time and patents don't last forever, so I don't see how this applies.
Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?
> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?
You're essentially just saying that you can't imagine a world in which there are business models that are different than the existing business models today. Which I don't really get, because there are plenty of businesses that don't rely on patents or copyrights to do business. Plenty of ways to make money in other ways.
- Let's take music, for example, which is a form of content. Where do artists make most of their money? From touring, from actually going out and playing, which is a form of labor.
- Let's look at code, which is another form of content. How do tech startups make most of their money? From copyrighting and licensing their code? No. From hosting and serving it, which is a form of digital labor.
- Etc.
Drug companies I'm sure would find a way. They would just have to transition from being intellectual property holders (making money on high margins) to being service and manufacturing specialists. But people would find a way to make a profit, just like they do in every other competitive industry.
The idea that you need copyrights and patents in order to spur investment, research, creativity, or capitalistic enterprise is completely false, and thoroughly disproven.
I wonder if this could be explained in a similar way to Hollywood movies. If the movies are designed to please the largest group of people, there is a greater chance people will choose to see it than another movie. The human law professors come with their own personalities, beliefs, and opinions that come through in their writing. An LLM has been trained to please the largest swathe of the population. That doesn't mean the answer is better; just like Captain America isn't necessarily better than American Beauty.
How do you envision that playing out? It would basically be like everyone that didn’t still have a job living off minimum wage. Would no one be allowed to work also?
So I would envision that, as AI starts to makes jobs obsolete, the people whose jobs were made obsolete, would get some sort of balanced percentage of what they were making. The more they were making the lower the percentage would be. But it would balance to around median/average, so if you were making current median, this is around what you would still get. So it should not go under that. If you were making 3x median, maybe it would be 80% - 90% of that. To be able to still incentivise automation, but keep people's quality of life without drastic changes. I haven't thought this through, so these are just initial ideas. But main ideas would be to keep income level similar, while trying to find them other things to do.
Initially they would get it under some conditions that they might be studying something else or whatever else makes sense productivity wise. Ultimately not minimum wage.
Depending on how fast AI would automate things, the balance should change, but ultimately income should provide similar quality of life as was before, but increasing as time goes on for the less fortunate who were making less before.
So if someone who is making 3x median now, they might be getting 2.3x while doing nothing, and 2.7x while learning/doing something else productive. Someone who was making 1x median, would still get 1x median, but as AI produced value increases and more replacement happens, the 1x should climb and eventually e.g. in 10 years everyone's would equalize in such a way that no one's quality of life due to job displacement shouldn't suffer, but who previously had lower income would reach similar levels of income gradually as all jobs are replaced.
And you would be allowed to work or switch work if you wanted, but there would be some sort of formula for decreasing what you get, while still incentivising you to work if you want to. E.g. if you were making 3x being a software engineer and want to take up hand crafting something or construction, you could but, you might be maxed at getting total of what you were making before, so construction + bonus could make up to only 3x.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.
Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
I don't really see how you got to your comment from what I quoted. However, somewhat relatedly, I proposed a thought experiment about this in the comments for Opus 4.7[0]:
> It's April, 1991. Magically, some interface to Claude materialises in London. Do you think most people would think it was a sentient life form? How much do you think the interface matters - what if it looks like an android, or like a horse, or like a large bug, or a keyboard on wheels?
> I don't come down particularly hard on either side of the model sapience discussion, but I don't think dismissing either direction out of hand is the right call.
With the amount of data these models have, they should be much more capable if there was an actual intelligence behind it. If you saw someone running into a wall continuously until you showed them how to use a door, even though they have seen people use doors a million times, what would you call that?
The fact that Anthropic needs to poke, prod, and guide these models to behave in the desired way does not give the impression of intelligence. It gives the impression of a complicated automaton.
This is such a bizarre statement, you speak as if you have any understanding of how much data "should be" required to make an intelligence but frankly you don't know. None of us know.
I am not talking about how much data is required to make intelligence. I am talking about how it uses the data it already has. It can tell you about every scam in the book, research about the scams, how to spot scams, who does the scamming, etc. Everything under the sun about scams. However, without the “skill” included in a prompt it will fall for scams.
If I may slightly tweak your example to highlight why I find it very flawed:
> It's April, 1891. Magically, a drone swarm with lights piloted to show a face [0] materialises above London. Hidden speakers command the public to listen, for this is their Gods arrival. Do you think most people would think this was a religious entity? What if the drone pilots decided to adjust to something the local populous would expect to see during the second coming, does that matter?
We cannot, nor should we discard what we know about LLMs and their limitations. Such examples are not really helpful and it is very reductive to take the "walks like a duck" approach to autoregressive models in 2026, when we have ample evidence that these, while powerful and capable in a lot of use cases, are not in any way comparable to actual reasoning. With EBM [1] we already have empirical evidence that other solutions can get us closer to actual artificial reasoning (though whether these get us fully there remains to be seen, I tend to lean on "extraordinary evidence" for any such statement at this stage).
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