Pylimitics

The court case between news organizations and AI vendors just made public some interesting internal documents from the AI folks, calling scraping news “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

I think the intellectual foundation of this behavior goes back to the original scam of claiming that when someone creates something — by writing, for example — that something is “property.” Bullshit; it is not property. There are a lot of things that have come to be called “property” that are not, and that should be obvious… but it’s not because “property” has been woven into our usage for a long time. I don’t know where this came from originally, but I’d bet it has something to do with “economists” from the era of Reagan and Thatcher. They have a lot to answer for.

Property is something that can be reasonably measured in money. But that does not include everything, and it doesn’t include nearly as much as is now widely assumed. How much money is your privacy worth? How much would it take to buy your children? How much should you pay to have an enemy killed? The answer to all of those is “unask that question.” (scroll down to “non-dualistic meaning on the linked page) Here’s an example from Robert Pirsig of a question that must be unasked:

For example, it’s stated over and over again that computer circuits exhibit only two states, a voltage for “one” and a voltage for “zero.” That’s silly! Any computer-electronics technician knows otherwise. Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off! The circuits are in a mu state.

As for your creative output, that’s not property either. In some cases you can exchange an artifact stemming from your creativity for money, but the artifact is a byproduct. Your creative output is the process you engage it. Writers, musicians, artists — probably all creative people (which is everybody) have a style or voice that’s unique to them. That is the creativity. And it’s not property.

Seeing too many things as “property” is a consequence of focusing far too much on business and commerce. Those concerns can be real but try not to live such a shallow life that you think they matter very much. The shopkeepers of a civilization are never remembered no matter how big their shops. Civilizations are known and remembered for their artists.