this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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I don't always agree with Doctorow, but at least he's not as naive as you make him sound, and he's not a coward.
He's a bit of a traditional socialist in his way of thinking, putting most of his attention on the underlying material and economic mechanisms of a phenomenon, rather that the ideological and cultural aspects of it.
For instance, he thinks that many of the harms are side effects of the hype. To him, for instance, putting illustrators out of work is not a business model and can't justify the money that's spent on this. It's just an ad to attract more investment. If the bubble pops, then this will be significantly reduced.
If you expected Doctorow to get very upset over copyright, you clearly have no idea who he is. But he also literally has a book titled "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free".
He thinks model training is most likely fair use (probably true) even if the way the data are obtained violates copyright, and that giving more copyright to the authors will do nothing to mitigate this (near certainly true).
And since the output of LLMs is not copyrightable except for the part of human labor that goes into improving and editing it, relying heavily on LLMs is a dead end for publishers, because then everyone can steal their work (not totally sold on this one).
And finally, if we reject the hype, I find it hard to not consider LLMs to be a technology like any other. How can you buy in the exceptionalism and reject the hype?
That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don't hate those positions though I'll note they're more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn't quite work on GenAI tech.
You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media.
I think it is necessary to say: "Hey, we as a society shouldn't run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine." A tech-neutral attitude can't achieve that.
Weakening the private property rights associated with intellectual property is more socialist than strengthening them so that the owner has power over how others use that property.
It's ultimately a type of property, and libertarians tend to favor property rights that favor the owner, while socialists tend to seek to weaken property rights in favor of the public.
In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.
Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: "I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired." or "I shouldn't be forced to pay taxes." This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.
That's a little simplistic. From a legal perspective copyright is a state enforced monopoly. Perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to reject it.
In the same way, someone on the left could view it similar to the English enclosures. Taking for a private something that should be in common.
Ideologically speaking it can be perfectly plausible to reject the current overdone copyright regime from either perspective.
And by the way Doctorow talks about collective bargaining and unionizing like the whole time.
I can also recommend you a great book by a Chicago economist that argues against copyright on lassez faire grounds, closer to the libertarian position, but really well supported with a trove of historical case studies.
Libertarianism is closely aligned with strong property rights, and the right to exclude others from your property, the right to enter contracts, even oppressive contracts, that you've agreed to. In other words, the freedom to bind oneself and exclude others. Libertarians don't believe in granting the public freedom to walk onto private land and pick fruit from its trees (or the right to harvest lumber on someone else's land).
Strong copyright is therefore fairly associated with libertarian ideals.