_AI is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks._
The "AI is theft" argument is weak. It assumes that copyright is property that can be stolen, like in "you wouldn't steal a car". And it claims that the main issue with AI is that it appropriates the creative work of artists to create mediocre copies.
AI is more aptly described as "dead labor", in the way Marx described capital. It's a technology that actively uses prior work to increase capital accumulation. It's main use is to get more control of the production process for the capitalists. That's the theft, not that they used unlicensed scraping to train it.
And focusing just on the scraping in training, is obfuscating the data workers who actually feed AI with their daily work.
There's the joke about "Actually Indians", which not only applies to investment scams, but to all of AI.
AI is built on data sweatshops (not only in India of course), so for example when you run an image generator there's not only millions of scraped images behind it, but also ten thousands of hours of of the workers who added their descriptors to it and who manually filtered out the child porn and other horrible images from the training data. Without data sweatshops, AI wouldn't be possible.
The automation is built on exploitation, and it increases the exploitation even further. For creatives in the core countries, this is only visible as it takes their work and make a cheap mass product out of it, taking away their livelihood. But just as with the original Luddites and cotton, the colonial exploitation is a prerequisite of the automating away of the "skilled worker". The robbery of India enabled the British cotton industry, and the relatively cheap data workers of Kenya, India, Nigeria and elsewhere enables the AI industry.
Just focusing on copyright willfully ignores this, centering the artists as the victims, and as the Luddites before them, they are labeled as something belonging in the past who fights progress.
The fight is about who controls the labor and it’s gains, not about intellectual property. Property rights can and will be bought, even if you consider what they do now theft. Even with a fee to every artist, writer and content creator for the use of their work in AI training, AI would still be a threat to their livelihood. Fighting for a copyright regime that in the end only reinforce the capitalist control of creative industries won't save the creative workers.
The Luddites were machine-breakers, current workers do the same to data centers. That's at least a more creative approach than the semi-legalese of those who complain about AI as theft.
