Ownership is just a story that we tell each other, a social construct. If people don’t agree on these stories, the concept loses its inherent power. This is true of owning land, money, cars, houses, art, mines, oil-wells, factories, corporations, relationships, loyalties, copyrights, brands, patents or anything else that is owned by you, me or those ever-superior “others”.
In a society where change occurs gradually, we become accustomed to the narratives that bind us together and determine who possesses significant wealth, resources, attention, power, fame, and other ego-gratifying treasures, and who has access to only meager portions of these.
However, when societies change and new types of goods appear, there might be no agreement about who gets to own these. For example, while the concept of owning ideas and words might have ancient roots, it was only a few centuries ago, with the invention of the printing press, that we all agreed to respect copyrights. We took that change in our stride.
Now, everything is changing very fast and fights are starting to break out about who should own the new goods capable of consolidating power and defining who enjoys abundance and who is left with mere scraps. Many of us have been creating content these last few decades, but now, AI can suck it all up and create something very valuable. There are lots of jobs to be lost and lots of money to be made. But the fires driving this newfound wealth need to be stoked with vast quantities of previously public words, images, video, ideas and recognizable faces and icons.
We can’t rely on the stories about who owns what, because everything has changed. After ingestion by the AI, our content might look different and we don’t even know, for sure, who ate whose food.
Here’s one example of how this problem is playing out. The owners of Reddit and Twitter (X) are both really angry that the AI has been sucking up all the content on their sites. They want to own all these words and sell them for a lot of money or to train their own AIs. But wait, who created all these words? When we tweeted and posted, we thought that these were our words, spoken on a public platform. We flocked here for the convenience, avoiding the need to maintain our personal websites or navigate cumbersome message boards. We never agreed that we were giving away exclusive rights to our thoughts.
Perhaps the power of AI should be given back to all of us. Perhaps it should be distributed to every person on the planet with adequate safeguards to prevent those with malicious intent from wielding new powers. Yet no matter how crucial these safeguards are, they shouldn't justify the bickering among the affluent and influential over how to consolidate this newfound authority for themselves.
A final message to the lawmakers and judges who will adjudicate these disputes: Maybe you should retain all the wealth and resources for yourselves. After all, without your diligence, we wouldn't have achieved the necessary stability to build all this in the first place. Perhaps it should rightfully belong to you after all.
But, of course, I could be wrong.
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