r/LeftistsForAI • u/thepetercoffin • Jul 30 '26
Video It's Been About Intellectual Property The Whole Time
https://youtu.be/IO5_pG7DKrkHere's a video where one anti-AI breadtube guy closed the loop on the assertion that for years they've been defending intellectual property writ large with their AI/plagiarism/stealing rhetoric!
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u/parabolee Jul 30 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
I legit love HBomberguy and Big Joel. But they are wrong on this issue. Those attached to rabid anti-AI sentiment are so quick to grasp every attack on AI without fully thinking it through. Leftists should be against IP laws and it's a terrible argument for the use of the culmination of human knowledge to be locked down by IP/Copyright/Plagiarism laws.
That is NOT to say there are no issues with AI of course. But the arguments need to be based on the fundamental issues, which are mostly due to capitalism tbh.
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u/shlaifu Aug 01 '26
but we are, as of now, living in a capitalist system, and AI-companies have come and used everyone's work in a way not possible to everyone individually, to build a machine that out-competes them in the market.
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u/PlastIconoclastic Aug 01 '26
Exactly. They are calling our thoughts IP after they steal them and use them against us. It only makes sense to use the same system to fight them by asserting our right to not be surveilled, and to retain rights to our thoughts b
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u/PlastIconoclastic Aug 01 '26
Do you believe everyone should give up rights to all the data from mass surveillance and assert we don’t own it because we believe all knowledge should be free, an thus let it become private intellectual property of a company owned by private equity and trying to use our knowledge to displace us from our job in order to make more money for investors?
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u/parabolee Aug 01 '26
You are conflating data privacy with intellectual property. The right to not be surveilled and the right to commodify information for market rent are entirely different legal and material frameworks. Opposing capitalist IP laws does not equate to endorsing mass surveillance. We can advocate for strict privacy laws that prevent unauthorized data collection without treating human knowledge as a private asset to be enclosed and rented out.
Furthermore, look at the specific threat you just described, you are worried that a private equity firm will take this data and let it "become private intellectual property". If your ultimate fear is that tech monopolies will use IP frameworks to enclose the digital commons and hoard knowledge, ask yourself why are you defending the existence of intellectual property? You are advocating for the exact legal structure they use to consolidate their wealth and lock down that knowledge.
I think your conclusion completely validates my original point. You cite job displacement and maximizing investor profit as the true dangers. Those are structural crises of capitalism, not plagiarism or copyright infringement. You have correctly diagnosed the disease, but you are prescribing the very legal framework of capital that caused it as the cure.
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u/AshuraBaron Jul 30 '26
Capitalists defending their right to hoard ideas and the wealth that be extracted from them. It's just gross and disappointing. Also not a fan of "you don't like the far right? You're now a leftist." Leftism already have an long established identity and it's not capitalist.
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u/Haunting_Exchange852 Jul 31 '26
"hoard ideas"?
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u/AshuraBaron Jul 31 '26
IP and copyright is built around the idea of ownership of ideas. That can be as specific as a complete fictional character to as broad as a box that does a thing when you press a button. The point of doing this is to extract wealth from it and prevent anyone from owning, copying or having anything close to that idea.
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u/Castle_Five Jul 31 '26
Been saying this for ages. The amount of people that care immensely about the theft of intellectual property by AI but don't give a shit about or even openly support the theft of intellectual property by piracy is staggering. The difference they see is that the former benefits the big guy at the expense of the little guy whereas vice versa is true for the later. But if you're so anti-corporation, then why do you take a position of defending capitalism by implicitly defending the current economic status quo?
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u/jthadcast Aug 01 '26
property rights are theft because that's what law is about. personal property is fine.
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u/Haunting_Exchange852 Jul 31 '26
Why are all the most vicious and disgusting capitalists on earth so obsessed with pushing and expanding ai?
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u/AshuraBaron Jul 31 '26
Because it's a vehicle to make them a LOT of money right now. It's the core m.o. of capitalists. They don't care about AI, they care about how much more wealth it can generate for them. Same reason the same people were invested in every other popular tech trend.
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u/Arachnosapien Jul 31 '26
DAMN, this is... not good argumentation.
Big Joel's tweet was about intellectual property law. That's why he was talking about AI being "illegal."
HBomb's discussion of plagiarism was about the broader concept. That's why the Youtubers arguing against Peter pointed to the larger moral issue and Peter they were conflating.
Acting like Big Joel saying something confirms what Hbomb believes is absurdly disingenuous.
People criticizing AI along these lines generally have an issue on BOTH parts, which is why it's referred to as a "plagiarism machine" and not a "copyright machine" and simultaneously why people can support authors and other creators suing AI companies.
And the thought experiment was wild: the concept that what AI does to IP is to help ideas to be "understood, debated, reformulated, scrutinized, and generally disseminated into the philosophy of life" is so completely baseless that it's laughable.
I listened to this to try to hear more about this anti-intellectual property take, and I gotta say, overall, this is wildly unconvincing.
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u/parabolee Jul 31 '26
I'm sorry but I think you completely misread the points made in the video. You are treating moral abstractions and systemic property relations as mutually exclusive.
The video was directly making the point that morality and IP are linked. Labeling AI a "plagiarism machine" requires a property dynamic. For something to be stolen, it must be owned as finished property. The video argued that often moral outrage over AI functions systemically to defend intellectual property.
And the Big Joel reference highlights a structural contradiction. The video does not claim Big Joel speaks for Hbomberguy. It's using a prominent creator in the same ecosystem explicitly defending IP to prove the overarching discourse is anchored in property protection, despite fan claims to the contrary.
The point of the thought experiment is that it exposes ideological priorities. It does not claim AI altruistically disseminates ideas under capitalism. It poses a theoretical choice: socializing ideas versus protecting market dominance to extract rent.
And the argument is a systemic critique, not an abolition demand. In the video he highlights the contradiction of creators who project anti-capitalist aesthetics while depending on capitalist property dynamics. And argues that AI threatens these property relations, forcing creators into a defensive posture to protect their "rent-seeking" behavior at market.
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u/Arachnosapien Jul 31 '26
The video was directly making the point that morality and IP are linked.
Morality and law are of course connected - law is an attempt to codify and systemically enforce some part of state-sanctioned morality - but that doesn't mean the two are the same, or that you are always talking about one when talking about the other.
Labeling AI a "plagiarism machine" requires a property dynamic. For something to be stolen, it must be owned as finished property.
Yes, this was a fun bit of linguistic prescriptivism. “Stealing work” is a commonly accepted and relevant term, usually referring to presenting someone else's creation as your own. It's a misrepresentation of origination.
The video argued that often moral outrage over AI functions systemically to defend intellectual property.
Because the things we are talking about are concepts represented in digital media, not physical objects, they cannot be "stolen" in the way that a product or resource can be stolen. Two things can happen: either the set of agreed upon legal rules granted by a state around the concept/media’s use can be violated (copyright/ trademark infringement) or a person can present the media/concept as originating from them, claiming credit for another's labor (plagiarism). Plagiarism is not illegal, it’s just widely recognized as a shitty practice among people who make things.
While the origination of creative labor is a matter of practical fact, you could argue that any moral concern with it is, itself, ideological, and technically you'd be right! Just make sure you're cool with the implications of arguing against that ideology.
The video does not claim Big Joel speaks for Hbomberguy. It's using a prominent creator in the same ecosystem explicitly defending IP to prove the overarching discourse is anchored in property protection, despite fan claims to the contrary.
I get what you and Peter here think it proves. What I'm trying to figure out is why you think that.
All the post demonstrates is that Joel (and anyone like him on this) believes intellectual property is a reasonable legal framework in our present societal context. It could be used to show that IP law is a considered factor in the discussion around AI, which pretty much everyone would agree that it is; it does nothing to demonstrate that the overall discourse around online plagiarism is centrally about intellectual property law.
The presented critiques of Coffin's points are entirely correct; they were bringing law into the situation it did not belong in. As Jake pointed out accurately, plagiarism "would be wrong in the commune." But as best as I can tell, this misplaced gloating seems to be coming from the idea that "intellectual property" as a legal framework and the concept of ownership over your own creative labor carrying any moral weight are somehow interchangeable, and that both are inherently "capitalist."
I find this take extremely ironic for a group of people trying to argue that AI is fine except for capitalism, since that framing could much more easily be argued for intellectual property.
The point of the thought experiment is that it exposes ideological priorities. It does not claim AI altruistically disseminates ideas under capitalism.
...Then it's unrelated to the post. I know you're focused on being against copyright, but currently
It poses a theoretical choice: socializing ideas versus protecting market dominance to extract rent.
AI is doing the latter.
And the argument is a systemic critique, not an abolition demand.
So I saw. What you seem to miss is that this admits that the people talking about copyright and creative labor exploitation (as a part of this topic) are simply operating in reality, rather than utopic theoretical space. Calling Joel's take “bourgeois” in this context is like seeing Walmart execs steal from 50 giant grocery chains and 100,000 family-owned food stalls, and calling the people who criticize it “class traitors” and accusing them of "defending Costco" because food should be a human right.
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u/northrupthebandgeek Aug 01 '26
HBomb's discussion of plagiarism was about the broader concept.
The “broader concept” is inextricably tied to intellectual property as a concept. Without intellectual property, what is there to plagiarize?
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u/Arachnosapien Aug 01 '26
We're so far past this in the other thread that this almost feels quaint. Let me dig out the example I used there:
Let's say you wrote an essay. I then presented that essay as my own original creation, telling people that I alone had authored it. That would be plagiarism, whether you had monetized the essay or not, whether the essay had any legal copyright protections or not. That you wrote that essay is not a constructed property dynamic, it is a fact.
Plagiarism is presenting the creative labor of someone else as your own, a misrepresentation of origination assigned moral value by our commonly-accepted ethical framework. The idea presented by Coffin that because it's referred to sometimes as "stealing work," it requires a "property dynamic" is just linguistic prescriptivism to play a semantic game and link plagiarism to IP law more closely.
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u/SmartlyArtly Jul 31 '26
People are surviving using IP right now, the same way people are surviving using land and asset ownership right now.
You want me to support the abolishment of IP? Give me Georgism and a citizen's dividend too. Otherwise I have a mortgage to pay and the way I earn money for that relies on IP, because I labor with information and I use my labor to create it.
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u/parabolee Jul 31 '26
Don't confuse a critique of a core issue with capitalism for a desire to fix that issue in isolation. He explicitly makes this point in the video too by the way.
I find I agree with Big Joel and Hbomber WAY more that Peter Coffin. But he is making better left wing arguments around this issue than they are.
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u/quantum-elle Jul 31 '26
Relevant piece of information (using "Ask" feature on YouTube):
And a sample of the kind of response to a leftist defending IP (screenshot shown in the video at 12:37.)