AI: The Biggest Heist in World History | The American Spectator

What do you get when you combine Big Tech, a Bill Clinton fixer, Davos, the architect of the Hunter Biden laptop disinfo, and “Artificial Intelligence”? The biggest heist in world history. A forced income transfer worth trillions of dollars, siphoned from the public, headed to a small sliver of the 1 percent.

There is nothing “artificial” about Artificial Intelligence. The frontier AI models — think ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — that underpin the explosion of AI products are built (“trained”) on very real intellectual property created and owned by millions of people and businesses not employed or compensated by the AI industry. Their work has been “scraped” from the internet by automated programs that go website to website, copying, without permission or payment, all the content on each site. (RELATED: The Peril and Promise of AI)

This material is housed in powerful data centers, which then regurgitate bits and pieces of people’s cleverness, wisdom, creativity, ingenuity, and other content they wrote that enables them to feed their families. Revenue collected from this reassembly of copyrighted works is then kept by the AI companies. (RELATED: Who’s Teaching Those AI Machines Your Kids Will Learn From?)

Let’s be clear: without “training” on other people’s property, there are no trillions of dollars in future revenue driving the astronomical valuations of AI companies. In its written submission last year regarding the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, Google readily conceded that this scraping “and text-and-data mining … have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn.”

The new Gold Rush is on, and global elites gathered in Davos in January to hash it all out. They were there at the invitation of the World Economic Forum, host of the annual Swiss Alps confab at which tech plutocrats, politicians, financiers, and their cheerleaders gather together to divvy up the world’s wealth. (RELATED: Dear Globalists, AI Won’t Defeat Christianity)

As a reporter covering the event noted, “the conference seemed transformed from past years, with tech companies … taking over the main promenade, while important topics like climate change failed to draw crowds.” (That may be the biggest accomplishment AI has yet made for society.)

That the AI elite would gather in Davos is particularly appropriate, as the entire ethos behind the AI heist — naked greed — was encapsulated by an infamous, unintentionally dystopian video released by the World Economic Forum in 2016, “8 predictions for the world in 2030.” Number One: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

They didn’t say “We’ll” own nothing. They said, “You’ll” own nothing. Why will you own nothing? Because they will own everything.

AI leaders contend that every bit of their theft is legal. The magical thinking that powers this is a simple phrase from copyright law, misused in a way that would make George Orwell blush: “fair use.”

Many will remember the quaint practice of teachers who made Xerox copies of book excerpts they then handed out to students, copies that were claimed to be a “fair use” because the teacher’s purpose was educational and she copied only a small portion of each book.

“Fair use” by schoolmarms has since been hijacked by profit-driven corporate behemoths, led by Big Tech, using other people’s creations to make the infringers rich. As AI Progress, a trade association of the AI industry, bluntly defends its mass scraping practices: “Fair use allows the use of copyrighted material without permission or payment.”

That is, unless you purloin their intellectual property. AI darling OpenAI recently complained to Congress of an AI competitor’s “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.” Google urges the administration to “oppose mandated disclosures that … allow competitors to duplicate products.”

Appropriating everything everyone else has created is “fair use,” we are told, because it is “transformative,” in which case the pickpockets allegedly get to keep the loot. The key to this alchemy is that the corporate wrongdoing be galactic in scope.

When 1990 rap phenom Vanilla Ice scraped a single (iconic) baseline for Ice Ice Baby from Queen and David Bowie in his song Under Pressure, his copyright infringement cost him millions (though without the theft, he would have made nothing).

Turns out Mr. Ice didn’t steal enough.

Google didn’t make that mistake when they began excerpting key paragraphs from virtually all newspaper articles — which they insisted was “fair use” — and published them on its website. As Google’s own AI now admits, “the U.S. newspaper industry has lost over 270,000 jobs — a decline of more than 75 percent” since Google’s 2004 IPO. And Google’s co-founders are now among the richest people on the planet.

This time, the AI industry is looking beyond ink-stained wretches. It wants to take everyone’s jobs. Yet we’re told AI mass content appropriation occurs “without significantly impacting rightsholders” and lets AI companies avoid pesky “negotiations with data holders.” (The looter walking off with a television during a riot can relate: who wants to be bothered negotiating with product owners?) (RELATED: The AI Employment Apocalypse Is Only a Few Years Away)

One of the most aggressive voices leading this brazen campaign is a front group funded with dark money and tens of millions of dollars from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta called American Edge. Their angle is that China will “win” if U.S.-based AI billionaires are forced to pay for using other people’s property. The group is run by a former Democrat party political operative. Its Advisory Boards include at least four former members of Congress who voted to invite China into the WTO, which President Trump has noted led to the closure of 60,000 U.S. factories.

Blue-collar America hollowed out, these same people are now coming after American white-collar jobs.

Another Advisory Board member is none other than Michael Morell, who directed the 2020 campaign interference falsely suggesting Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. The author of this disinformation is now advising American Edge on how to message AI’s intellectual property theft.

(ChatGPT owner OpenAI, meanwhile, hired Bill Clinton capo and fixer Chris Lehane to bully communities to accept gargantuan data centers and lawmakers and judges to greenlight AI’s IP theft.)

American Edge calls on lawmakers to ignore “restrictive copyright theories” that would require owners to be compensated for the use of their property. The authors of those “theories” were merely the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. They delegated to Congress an enumerated power in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

With all due respect to Mr. Zuckerberg, we’ll stick with the Framers when it comes to understanding property rights.

It would be absurd for “fair use,” a judge-invented doctrine later codified by Congress, to subvert the very purpose Congress was granted this enumerated right in the Constitution.

To return to the school example, former theater kids will remember when their lines were learned from officially licensed, and paid for, scripts and scores published by the copyright owners — the people who created the work (or purchased the rights to it from those who had).

If a high school drama club wants to put on “Hamilton,” it must obtain consent from and compensate the play’s authors. The musical’s subject, a staunch advocate of the Constitution, would have demanded the same of the AI industry.

The writer holds degrees from Yale University and the NYU School of Law, where he was an Associate Editor of the Law Review. His only high school theater work was on the stage crew of The Threepenny Opera, a tale of greed and hypocrisy. He is on X at @mikeparanzino.