Essay:Intellectual property in the times of AI

Essays reflect solely their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.

← Back to all essays | Author's essays Intellectual property in the times of AI

by CriticalResist
Published: 2025 (last update: 2025-11-05)
30-50 minutes

TBD

Read more

Commercial AI has existed for the past 3 years, kicked into gear by the release of chatGPT in November 2022. Prior to that, research into machine-learning and neural networks had existed for several decades, though they had trouble finding widespread use due to hardware limitations at the time. It was in the 2000s that "deep learning", the foundation to modern neural networks (which trains what becomes chatGPT, Midjourney, DeepSeek, and all the famous names), became a reality.

Regardless of one's feelings on the matter, we can clearly say that AI has been transformative because it never fails to provoke heated arguments. And not only that, but the arrival of commercial models, that is, models that can be run either in your browser (on a cloud service) or on your own machine (local) seems to have shifted perspectives entirely. What becomes bothersome is that self-proclaimed communists seem to have done a complete 180 on intellectual property, and this is what we want to focus on.

Some definitions first: by AI, I mean modern neural networks specifically -- which includes but is not limited to generative AI such as Large Language Models or image generation models. By art, I mean any of the established art forms: painting (i.e. illustration), sculpture, literature, architecture, film, music, etc. A lot of the discourse around AI and IP (intellectual property) revolves around illustrative output specifically, which completely ignores film, literature and music.

The five arguments of anti-AI

In this essay, I will not coddle communists. You are not babies, and do not need me to use baby words to make the AI pill easier to swallow. Yet, this is often what we are forced to do to make any point about AI. There are many, many things to discuss about AI (both good and bad!), and we'll get into them. But most of the time, AI revolves around five arguments:

1. You stop using your brain,
2. It's bad for the environment,
3. It's not actually art/it looks bad,
4. It's a bubble,
5. It destroys jobs (to address)

Making any discussion outside of these five hot topics impossible. I know that by pointing out these arguments and responding to them I will invite discussions on them when my point here is to talk about intellectual property, but I feel I couldn't properly talk about IP laws if I didn't address these arguments first. This is because at its core, these arguments come from a place of not wanting to actually struggle with the problem. Rather, some people seem to think that if they ignore AI (the ostrich technique) or deride it and its perceived proponents enough, it will suddenly go away.

But clearly AI is not going away - you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. This isn't a crypto or NFT situation, this is something that over a billion people have used in their daily life already, and keep adopting. And not only that, but there is a very overlooked open-source ecosystem that goes far beyond what the proprietary likes of openAI or Midjourney offer. Even if you were somehow able to stop AI development completely (which would also mean stopping research into neural networks, including those that focused on medical applications), what would happen to the models living on people's machines right now? They will still exist and still be usable. Go on civitai or huggingface right now and look at all the models coming out every week: this has been going on for 3 years straight.

Therefore as communists we must struggle with the topic, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, to find its dialectic and resolve the contradictions, from which will emerge a third, new thing that did not exist previously. As communists we have had to struggle with many things before, and we will continue to do so. We can't abdicate as soon as something is too difficult to wrap our head around. We don't have the luxury of saying "I'm just not that interested in this" because the bourgeoisie isn't saying this. Every moment we refuse to contend with AI, the bourgeoisie is making more models, pumping more investment capital into it, building more datacenters.

This also answers the fourth argument: it's a bubble. Yes, AI in the West (we'll come back to this) is a bubble. It's similar to the dot com boom of the early 2000s: huge, risky investment for a potential future payoff that does not seem to be coming. But overvaluation is not new, and we see that after the dot com bust, the Internet did not go away. Rather what happened was that some companies disappeared, and their property, talent and infrastructure was acquired by what are now today's giants: Amazon, Google (now Alphabet), eBay, Cisco, and even Nvidia. They acquired talent and property on the cheap during the bust phase and now decide for us what goes on on the Internet, Amazon and Google especially.

The boom and bust cycle was clearly explained by Marx. A new market emerges, capital floods it and tons of new companies open (the boom phase), but then overproduction lowers the rate of profit, several of these companies go bankrupt and we enter the bust phase. But an equally very important part of Marx's analysis is that not all companies go bankrupt in that phase. Those that remain solidify their position in the market, and become monopolies. The boom and bust cycle doesn't just explain economic crises but also the tendency of capitalism to form monopolies.

The belief that AI will go away after the bubble pops is supported neither by theory nor by historical examples. Not only will open-source models still exist and be available after the bust, not only will research into neural networks still take place (by very skilled scientists might I add, who are often completely left out of the conversation), but what will happen is AI will get consolidated into fewer companies. And yes, I do believe AI in the West is an overinflated bubble, predicated on capitalism's own contradictions (the inherent 'anarchy of production' as Engels said and the incessant need to always open up new markets because of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall): they are trying to make it profitable and pumping money into it to get a return on investment. But it's just not that profitable, as Chinese models show.

When Deepseek-r1 came out in January of this year, it completely destroyed the western model of the AI market. Deepseek is a smaller model that came out of nowhere (the parent company is a trading company, so not in AI or even in tech), trained on less than 100 million dollars versus the 1 billion USD openAI swears high and low it absolutely needs. Suddenly, the investment doesn't seem viable and people are realizing they got taken in by capitalist promises.

About the idea that AI destroys your brain: they also said TV would fry my brain and we shouldn't have a calculator in our pocket at all times. What we found instead is that people adapt to new conditions, and have done so for millennia. Do I also stop using my brain when I use a lighter to make a campfire instead of rubbing sticks together? And, is knowing how to make friction fire a required skill in the 21st century? The example is a bit far-fetched, but it's how society advances, skills come and go when they are no longer socially necessary (taking here after the socially necessary labor time). Who could say they know how to use a mechanical loom, or a steam locomotive? And yet, our ancestors who did run the steam locomotives would likewise be completely lost if we put them in a modern train cabin.

Many arguments brought against AI today have been made historically, and found insufficient by the dialectics of time. Some people were also opposed to electrification when it came out -- though a lot of it was spurred by the gas lobby. What we found instead is that gas companies started getting into the electricity market when the writing was on the wall. Today, anyone saying they would rather go back to gas lightning over LED lightbulbs would not be taken seriously. Is AI the modern electric lightbulb? Not necessarily. Maybe? It is clear however that having a kneejerk reaction to it, in either direction, will not seriously answer the question: both from the capitalists that swear it will do everything (LLMs clearly don't and neural networks in general still need more research done into them to find emergent uses), and from the comrades that think it does nothing whatsoever (we use it a lot to code front-end stuff on ProleWiki which improves the reading experience of our readers, to name just one usecase. If you use a custom font or the sepia theme while reading this essay, you are using code written by AI).

In the same way, I don't like using the word Luddite. The luddites were a historical movement that do not exist in our current conditions: it's an easy cop-out to not have to make a point. But we need to make arguments, and we need to make them sooner rather than later. But to do that, we need to abandon kneejerk reactions and treat our comrades on an equal level, and one side is more guilty of this than the other. In fact, I already expect many of these reactions to this essay.

This brings me to the next point: AI art looks bad.

So did the first human paintings on the caves of walls. So do my own illustrations. Again, I use art to mean all art forms, but this argument is usually reserved for illustrative work specifically. But focusing on illustration art (painting, drawing etc) is a trap; it creates a microcosm that prevents us from looking at the big picture. In fact, generative AI may be able to help circle around IP laws. The actual effect it will have is difficult to predict and we don't have any hope of capitalism doing the right thing, of course, but to me this is a much more important problem to focus on. Yes AI art may sure look bad, and yes it may not be art, but then what? What has this argument changed in the past 3 years it's been used? Facebook is rife with terrible AI images passed off as real because they opened monetization a few years ago, and so everyone is trying to post as often as possible to get as many impressions as possible to make as much money as possible. Models are getting better and better at generating images, to the point that some look absolutely lifelike. Clearly, the technology is improving, not stagnating. This is an image generated by a local, open-source model using only my own GPU:

Does it have artefacts? Yes, probably. The text probably makes no sense and I'm sure looking deep enough into it you might notice some things that are not natural. There's not really a background and the grain of the table looks a bit fake. But it also looks very realistic, and this is where we're at now. 3 years ago image models could not even get books right.

This is what you have to contend with if you want to remain anti-AI, and it will give you much stronger arguments than simply saying "it looks bad" as if that was a given outside of specific circles that already agree with this opinion. The ecosystem is developing and moving with or without you, and with or without me! Even if we were to ban AI, even if we were to break up openAI, Grok, Gemini, and whatever else exists commercially, even if we stopped all research into AI, even if one thinks 40 seconds to generate this book cover on a wooden tabletop is simply outrageous, we will not be able to remove this model from thousands of people's machines. It will be able to keep creating images like these for years to come.

My point here is that this is the reality we are now in, and arguments about quality have never stopped anyone, because what counts as quality to you may not count to someone else. I come from a graphic design background, and when I was in school spec work was all the rage to rally against -- spec work is the practice of a client submitting a design request for which designers submit their work, the client then picks one winner and pays them while the other participants leave having performed free labor. For all our posturing, arguing and debating against spec work, we did not stop a single contract from being signed.

"AI images look bad" is an old tired argument that people just don't care about outside of specific circles. Not all illustrative work is meant to look good. Some is just meant to accompany a blog post, or fill up space in a PowerPoint. Not all illustrative work is art, plainly speaking. First of all because there cannot be true art in capitalism (its nature as a commodity to be bought and sold will always overtake the artistic aspect), and secondly because not everything is inherently art on virtue of being drawn. As a graphic designer, I never thought that the logos and designs I made were art in any way: they exist to convey a marketing intent. We make logos, flyers and videos to get you to buy something, not to hang on your wall and admire. This is why I separate illustrative work from art.

This also allows me to answer the environmental aspect: first, there is currently research being done that severely reduces the environmental impact needed to train and run AI. Just recently, Alibaba (who trains Qwen) found an algorithm to squeeze more models on GPUs, reducing the amount of graphics cards needed by 82% in their datacenter. Secondly, once the model is made, these 40 seconds of my GPU being used to make a picture amount to literally 0 watts consumed. Open-source AI is clearly the way forward, as all software is, and this is just one reason.

We have to be careful with how we wield environmental arguments because they can very easily be used against the working class if we're not careful. Watching videos on Youtube is also bad for the environment. Youtube hosts centuries worth of footage, and they need datacenters not only to store all of those videos, but also to serve them to you quickly on a web page. A few years ago, it was all the rage on Linkedin to rant about the climate impact of Youtube. If we were to follow their argument. When the environmental argument focuses on datacenters, we are essentially arguing against wanting the Internet. If we were to focus on how datacenters operate currently however, then we could argue for better laws to protect the environment while still retaining data centers. This is something capitalism is very bad at doing (see the Paris Accords), and gives us an angle of attack to organize with. Capitalism will not save the climate, so we need to move beyond capitalism. It's not just the datacenters, it's the whole system.

All of this ties in with the idea that AI "destroys jobs". If only we showed people that AI images are worse than human artists, then we could save illustrators! But that is not how capitalists think. They don't think it looks better, they think it's much cheaper, faster and gives same results.

Much like the environmental angle, the argument shouldn't be "destroy AI to preserve jobs" -- capitalism nurtures an underclass of unemployed workers, and if we really want to preserve jobs then we are essentially arguing for going back to the age of subsistence farming, where you could die of starvation if your harvest was botched and you wore the same clothes until the threads literally dissolved, but at least you had a "job" (working the farm from sunrise to sunset).

Interestingly, when electrification came to Sweden and industrial jobs were being deleted due to the productivity gains, the demand of striking workers was not to undo electrification and rehire, but for better pay. The argument was, if you're going to make me do the work of 10 people, then you can afford to pay me 10x more. This is a much stronger angle because it's universal to every worker. It speaks to everyone. The case in point is that illustrators didn't think their work would ever get automated (or if they did they didn't think it would happen so soon). Everybody thinks they're irreplaceable.

The effects of AI on the job market however are not so clear-cut. Many companies who were initially taken in by the promises of tech companies to replace their workforce with AI are now walking it back and rehiring, while others are opening up jobs in other areas to make use of AI-assisted human labor.

Regardless, we already have the solution to all of these problems: socialism. On ProleWiki, everything we do is in service to the reader. Our design and development philosophy is to make the website more customizable, more able to answer your needs. We don't want you to spend several minutes trying to find the page you're looking for because this allows us to serve more ads (cough cough Google Search); we don't serve ads, we don't ask for your money, and we don't need to maximize your time spent to please investors that don't exist. Our use of AI on ProleWiki is completely different than how it's used by tech companies. And yet, we cannot excise ourselves from capitalism no more than forming a commune in the woods is socialism: open-source models, as interesting as they are, often depend on proprietary models for their training. Capitalist companies themselves make heavy use of open-source code which they reuse for free, and sometimes even extinguish once they have milked it dry.

Yet, this shows that AI does have a place in socialism and communism. Maybe not a society-transforming place, but a place nonetheless. As AliBaba Cloud's Founder (Wang Jian) said, AI changes the way they think about and approach problems, it's one more tool in their arsenal to solve problems with. This does follow in the idea that AI is not the "fifth industrial revolution" or a "paradigm shift" like its hardest proponents believe, but it also shows that it has legitimate usecases and will continue to have them, it's not merely a "toy" or "slop" like the other side claims.

Capitalism destroys anything good before it even has a chance to begin, but that is not new. In AI research there are very smart and skilled people who want to do good things, only to find their research misappropriated to squeeze just a little bit more profits out of this late-stage capitalism hellscape we are in.

AI and intellectual property

As previously mentioned, Chinese models are accelerating the death warrant for overvalued western tech companies. Project Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative launched by president Trump died two weeks later when DeepSeek came out and needed only 100 million dollars and spare GPU power to train. Incidentally, DeepSeek is completely open-source -- as are most Chinese models -- and they contribute a lot to open software development. This has repercussions not just in AI but in all software. Research often pays off years later, only becoming fully relevant in due time.

Let's talk about training AI. I would ask a question. It is often remarked (and not wrongfully) that we want AI to do our chores so we can focus on our art, but it turned out AI is doing our art so we can do our chores. And yet, how is AI supposed to do our laundry if it can't recognize a laundry basket and use your laundry machine not made for it? How will the dirty laundry find itself in the washing machine, and the program started?

To achieve tasks like these, we need to train AI to have vision (a way to understand what an image depicts, either a photograph or a frame from a video feed), and this vision must be trained - just like ours. We didn't come into this world knowing what a laundry basket is, someone had to teach us. We do the same with AI. We teach it to recognize a laundry basket and dirty laundry from clean, and this requires that it has access to enough training data on laundry baskets, but also forks, knives, cats, basically everything that exists in this world that we take for granted.

Will we ever have AI do our chores in capitalism? Not if it's not profitable (which is looking increasingly likely as the bust phase approaches rapidly).

Meanwhile, Chinese company Unitree is releasing humanoid robots priced between 10 to 70 thousand dollars which you can get delivered to your doorstep today. At this stage the industry is in its very early stage, and these robots come only with an SDK, that is, it has no functions or code within it but only the capability to run your custom code. If you want your Unitree bot to go get something from the fridge for example, you will have to install a vision model that understands what a fridge is, and code the robot to open the fridge in some way.

Like I said, research often only pays off years later. Maybe humanoid robots are not that good at doing chores and we'll end up making a flatbed robot that carries your laundry basket, but it's good that someone is looking into it. This reminds me of the nuclear issue, which is also a hot topic in Europe. Europe has basically decided to abandon nuclear without having anything to replace it with. Germany, once a big producer of nuclear energy, has reopened coal plants to satisfy demand. There is now a huge energy crisis looming in Europe. Most people's argument against nuclear is that it's not safe enough, but no energy source is - in fact, nuclear is the safest when comparing historical deaths data (coal doesn't come out of thin air). Another reason nuclear is not "safe" is because we stopped researching nuclear tech in the 70s, and our plants are from that era. But with more research, much of which is done in Iran and China, we see that we can make nuclear more efficient and safer. Modern reactors are essentially meltdown-proof, and the Fukushima disaster happened because it was built right next to the sea in a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis, because it was cheaper than pumping the seawater further inland. Profits above people.

Nuclear is but one example, and AI is another. With more research into AI, who knows what will come out of it?

But this is exactly what intellectual property laws don't want to happen. IP holders don't want to make safe nuclear reactors or AI that does your chore, they want to make money.

What prompted me to write this essay is that I see many people in anti-AI circles cheer when a big name like George R.R. Martin or Shueisha (publisher of Shonen Jump magazine in which many famous series like One Piece, Naruto or Dragon Ball originated) are suing AI companies over perceived copyright infringement.

And this isn't just liberals and the apolitical kind cheering for the strong arm of the law; many self-proclaimed communists also rally behind these lawsuits that, they hope, will take down AI, even accepting some adverse effects in the process if it means the end of AI -- which, as we have seen, due to the prevalence of open-source AI is simply a pipe dream. Even if these IP companies won their lawsuits, the models on people's machine would still exist and be usable. It's like trying to remove a film you have downloaded from your hard drive.

In just 3 short years, we have gone from "abolish private property" to "actually maybe some copyright is good". But copyright law has never been made to protect the small artist against unauthorized use of their work. That is not its purpose. In every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class - in other words, bourgeois law protects the bourgeoisie, starting all the way back to the first copyright laws down to the situation we are in today, where Disney has extensively lobbied to extend copyright to 75 years after the author's death so they could keep making money off Mickey Mouse.

It reminds me of the old commercial, "You wouldn't download a car". We went from I totally would if I could to no I wouldn't because it might be used to train AI. We are sabotaging ourselves just so we don't have to hand anything over to the boogieman, AI.

There are many different arguments all coalescing around these lawsuits, the first of which is that when Shueisha is attacking openAI, this is inter-bourgeois fighting -- openAI after all also owns IP in the form of their own GPT models. But it still bears consequences for us proles, not only legally but also as an analytical tool to refine our own stance on copyright and AI.

The first thing to note is that these lawsuits often rule in favor of the AI company. This is because the companies bringing these lawsuits, most of which are in the entertainment industry, argue on the training of the model. Currently, training takes place by giving a model trillions of images/texts to work on, so that it can learn to recognize patterns. In LLMs, the model starts to learn which words tend to follow each other.

But this isn't simply a Markov Chain or pattern-matching like any program can already do. Through this process, the AI creates a neural network of its own, often referred to as a 'black box'. This network only speaks to the model: it learns to create its own network through the training process. Here is an example of what a neural network might look like:

Deepseek-r1 is also named "Deepseek:671B", with the B indicating how many neurons it has (in this case 671 billion). When recalling information, LLMs don't simply copy and paste from their training data -- an argument that was propagated early on but has now thankfully been abandoned, because it's a misconception. When you send Deepseek a prompt, the data transits through its 671B neurons to create an output token. How exactly your prompt travels through the neural network is for the LLM to decide and wouldn't make sense to a human observer, but at the end of the day it's math.

Image generation works similarly, and if you're interested I recommend this Youtube video from Computerphile narrated by Dr Mike Pound who is, incidentally, very excited about Deepseek and other open-source Chinese models because it allows him to do a lot of research in his field for which he publishes academic papers. The short of it is AI images are created from random gaussian noise, the same white noise that used to be on cathode TVs when you tuned to an unassigned channel. The model that creates the image also use a neural network (several in fact at different points of their training), but differently from LLMs. Early on when commercial image models appeared, a common argument I saw against them was that they "copied and pasted" thousands of images together to create an output, but this is not true: they actually learn to undo the gaussian noise on a picture to which noise was applied by creating their own neural network. Thus when making an image from scratch, a model starts with what was only ever random noise. Therefore, AI does not copy existing material: the training data is not even located within the model, only the resulting neural network is.

So far, the courts were not convinced by IP holders' argument that training AI constitutes copyright infringement in itself. Rather, the courts believe it falls under fair use - and I think that's a very important point to make a note of.

For one, I made sure to use the word neural network in the paragraphs above because you are very intimate with one of those: your own brain. The human brain works on a network of neurons, i.e. it's a neural network. AI may "only" be an approximation of the human neural network (much like a camera is only an approximation of our own eyes but I digress), but let me ask this open-ended question: if IP companies successfully stop AI training in a court of law and set a precedent, what stops them from coming after you? After all, in the process of learning to draw your own Ghibli scene on Krita, you had to study the Ghibli style, activating your neurons and "training" yourself to then draw that style. What stops them from making the claim that their style is the IP, and not just the character or the story script, because models such as Dall-e are able to replicate their style?

We know full well that IP companies want to be your sole provider for their IP, and not just in the entertainment industry. Adobe wants to be the only company that does photo editing - it's in the DNA of any capitalist enterprise to create a monopoly. This is why they create IP in the first place: they wouldn't make it (under a capitalist context) if there was no way to make money from it. If Shonen Jump wins its lawsuit against OpenAI, what would stop them from coming after you for drawing One Piece fan art, how would you prove it's not AI, how would you find the money to defend yourself in court, if they wanted to use that argument?

This is not far-fetched. Nintendo is a well-known litigator over IP, to the point that they believe they own the whole monster-taming genre because they own Pokémon. They have brought emulator developers to court and won, even forcing a man to pay back the millions Nintendo "feels" they lost to him hacking the Switch for others - a sum he will be paying off for the rest of his life, even as Nintendo was made aware he would never be able to pay everything back before he dies. Yet in many cases, these emulators are the only way to play old video games that publishers are sitting on and refuse to make available, simply because they don't believe it's a worthwhile investment from their part.

There are two things to keep in mind: 1- yes, this is "only" entertainment and there are more important things going on in the world, and we'll talk about them. But to that, 2- a lot of people want these IP companies to win "even if it means the end of fanfic writers" (said to me verbatim). It's losing sight of the big picture for a kneejerk reaction against AI. And clearly, even if entertainment licences are not 'important', they certainly are important enough to litigate over in court.

I feel there's been an entire reversal of copyright and intellectual property, where suddenly self-proclaimed communists side with big companies just to stick it to AI. It feels completely backwards. It's not just about making One Piece fan art on DeviantArt that only 30 people will ever see, it's about making IP free to use and remix. This is why we have Creative Commons licences. This is why we have fair use. Fair use has been used for decades by small creators of all kinds (including software developers and researchers) to create things, as it's the only tool we have to try and curtail copyright.

One can certainly argue that it's a slippery slope argument to claim that we will lose fair use simply over an AI lawsuit. It may be, but the point is that this is what IP companies are attempting to do when they bring these lawsuits. These companies already make heavy use of open-source and even copyrighted work, including fan artwork (for example the clothing brand Zara was repeatedly found to have stolen designs from artists to put on their t-shirts without compensation). Microsoft is notorious for relying on open-source code. They like open source and fan art when it suits them, and want to control them when it doesn't, because capitalism. And they know they can get away with it because they have money for lawsuits and you don't, and AI or not it doesn't change the fact that Nintendo can bankrupt you with a lawsuit if they want to drag it on.

What proponents of these lawsuits will have to explain is: beyond "destroying AI", what exactly do they think these lawsuits achieve that's beneficial to them?

Shueisha has no leg to stand on in its lawsuit against Sora (the video generation tool recently released by OpenAI) because a- the training process has already been litigated and found to be fair use and b- the output is not a copy of a One Piece episode, it wasn't lifted off a DVD or anything. Therefore it's transformative.

While I deliberately use the word copying, it's interesting that many people have gone back to the outdated "stealing" phraseology that we used to hear from RIAA anti-piracy ads (the Recording Industry Association of America). But piracy is not stealing, and neither is training AI with a dataset: it's copying. There's a very clear difference between the two, and this argument was settled over two decades ago already. Yet some artists are now bringing this wording back, when they spent the entirety of 2021 telling NFT owners that they would just "right click -> save" their picture.

Speaking of the RIAA, it's interesting to note that they are trying to enlist the help of indie artists to lobby against AI, when piracy is historically often what made small artists famous, and also gives them independence from controlling labels and even streaming services, as streaming services can ban you and your music for any reason without recourse. If you're not familiar with the RIAA, they basically represent the big three record labels: Sony, Universal, and Warner. If the RIAA gets its way, it will force indie artists into an even more precarious position, but this hasn't stopped them from enlisting A2IM (The American Association of Independent Music) or MWA (the Music Workers Alliance) in recent legal actions against "unauthorized use of copyrighted music in AI training models".

Does AI music threaten your livelihood as a small artist? No more than your livelihood is already precarious because of associations like the RIAA, whose labels control your revenue share, distribution and market access. What the RIAA is afraid of is not AI, but losing control over music, including your music. They are trying to retain their monopoly and limit your negotiating power. They claim to protect you against AI music so they can keep exploiting you. It's the same reasons they fought against piracy back in the day, and digital distribution before that. If they can't profit from it, then they don't want it to exist for anyone. The RIAA was even against early mp3 players.

Likewise, if Shueisha or others manage to attack the transformative aspect of fair use, then they can reinforce copyright and IP law in their favor by setting a precedent. And you're still not going to be protected if you are a creative, because you don't have the money to scour the web to find copyright infringement and litigate it in court. Even if lobbies such as the RIAA say they will protect you with their lobbying, they won't. You're on your own. But Shueisha will be very happy to come after you for drawing One Piece fan art for a commission (and then probably steal it for their own promo art). They will be very happy to force you to pay what little money you make for the rest of your life to pay not actual damage, but perceived damage to their profits.

And IP is more than just One Piece and A Song of Ice and Fire. IP is also software, medication (through patents), even game mechanics or even shapes (the Nike swoosh). These all form intellectual property. And yes, unironically, chatGPT models are also intellectual property: they belong to openAI who holds them as close trade secrets.

I feel with the advent of commercial AI I now have to argue for basic liberation of IP that the USSR had settled a hundred years ago already. I feel I now have to explain why communists should not want copyright to exist. Like I said earlier, Dr. Mike Pound is very excited for Chinese AI models that are open-source, because he can use them in research freely. He can fine-tune their training for his needs and create things. I don't know what research Dr. Pound is involved with currently, but I know that neural networks have already been used in the medical field to help analyze radio imagery and detect diseases. In China, neural networks are being deployed right now for what is called 'precision farming': AI-supported irrigation and fertilization systems that deliver nutrients based on real-time soil data. This boosts soil health, fights against soil degradation, and ensures food safety.

These models don't come out of nowhere: they rely on a whole host of prior open-source research and software packages that are freely accessible and usable. China, working under a socialist system completely different from the capitalist one we know, embraces open software, and they are now leading in the AI race. In fact, the five most popular open-source AI models are all Chinese. This is incidentally also a very strong argument for China in the 21st century: just go on the r/OpenLLaMa subreddit, and you will find plenty of non-communists starting to like China because they're the only ones offering an actual competitive alternative to western, proprietary models.

I often make the argument that if you don't like AI, you should like China because they are exposing how overvalued the western AI industry is). And if you like AI, you should also like China because they are putting out a ton of research and promoting more research by releasing their models for free.

Basically, we should be more like China.

It's no wonder that the global south is adopting AI, yet the anti-AI crowd mostly wants to focus on openAI who, while being a major player at the forefront of AI innovation, is also only a tiny part of a much bigger ecosystem that transcends IP and borders. It's missing the forest for the trees, literally. Iran recently published academic guidelines surrounding the use of AI (as related to me by a fellow ProleWiki editor currently studying in Iran): they allow LLM use provided the student notes the model and time of usage, and can prove they understand the material. Cuba is working on making its own Large Language Model.

When I brought up to an (admittedly random) communist that Beijing was teaching middle- through high-school students AI for a reason, they dismissed this news entirely, saying that "China is wrong", period. To them, the matter was settled. No struggle is even needed: they know more than anyone else. That is not the correct stance to take, nor is it to proclaim "China does everything right!". The correct stance is to ask: what do they see in AI that we don't? Why are they teaching it while we want to keep it out of classrooms at any cost? This is dialectics.

China's use of AI in agriculture makes perfect sense when one considers that 1- they have to feed 1.5 billion people, 2- they have to develop self-sufficiency everywhere as sanctions have been enacted against AES and countries that go against the imperial order, and c- prior to the establishment of the People's Republic, famines used to hit China every 10-20 years. It makes complete sense then why China would want to put effort into AI. And because their system works for the people and not for corporations, success is determined not in quarterly returns or how many 20$/month subscription tiers they can sell, but in how much agricultural output increases.

The same can be said of Iran. Under heavy sanctions, they have to find ways to develop rapidly. Any time Iran does some research into nuclear (so they can build reactors and medical imagery devices), the US enacts more sanctions against them. The USSR did the same (albeit under different circumstances): in two generations, the USSR went from a post-feudal country with an entrenched nobility to beating the Nazis to going into space. An argument I sometimes still see around AI is "we don't need it anyway", but that's true of everything - we don't even need fire to live, really. But the point is, had the USSR said "we don't need the steam machine to work the fields, the serf system has served us well for hundreds of years" they would have never caught up with the huge gap between Russia and the West and they would have been destroyed either by the White Army or the Nazis.

Is AI existential for the global south? That remains to be seen. But what's pretty certain at this point is that AI is not going away (chiefly because you cannot legislate what happens outside of your borders), and to take ourselves out of the conversation regarding AI on grounds that it's icky or we don't like it is only ceding ground to the bourgeoisie that will and is using it right now. It's like the advent of missile warfare when the first missiles came out: it was certainly a huge game changer on the battlefield, and missiles are certainly used to kill people, but to refuse to use them too because they might be scary (i.e. moral grounds) means that you will not be able to fight against the enemy effectively. What we need to do with AI is study it, struggle with it, and reach a proletarian line on it that counters the bourgeois line on AI. And a proletarian line necessarily finds that workers need free research, free art, and free software.

I illustrated this essay with an AI picture of Samuel Jackson as Lenin for this reason: it is onto us to find how to make best use of this technology, regardless of what capitalists want to sell us. We refuse their solutions and create our own. The image in question was posted on the subreddit r/AIArt where it's one of the best-rated post (1439 upvotes), and they are not communists by any stretch. Even communists who are usually anti-AI responded well to this image when it came out. My point is that there is agitprop potential in there, on top of what I already said about how we use it when developing for ProleWiki, and I'm sure there's a lot more uses to make out of it that are only waiting to be discovered, shared and refined. But this won't happen while we are still stuck in "you used AI? That's bad and you should feel terrible end of discussion".

In fact, I posit that AI will allow people to do things they couldn't have done before. Before the days of AI which seem so far away now, creatives that could not bring their vision to life would simply give up. Not everyone who wanted art for their game or to illustrate their novel learned to draw. Those that could not afford a dedicated artist simply gave up, and their project never took off the ground.

Moreover, I think a lot of people will change their mind on AI if they start using it (I know I did), and perhaps that's what they're scared of. But as communists, we can't afford to be scared. If we were, then we wouldn't believe communism is possible.