Last week I discovered that an article I wrote about the England cricket team has already been copied and repackaged, verbatim and without permission, by an Indian website. What is the appropriate response here? Decry and sue? Shrug and move on? I ponder the question as I stroll through my local supermarket, where the mackerel fillets are wreathed in metal security chains and the dishwasher tabs have to be requested from the storeroom like an illicit little treat.
On the way home, I screenshot and crop a news article and share it to one of my WhatsApp groups. In another group, a family member has posted an AI-generated video (“forwarded many times”) of Donald Trump getting his head shaved by Xi Jinping while Joe Biden laughs in the background. I watch the mindless slop on my phone as I walk along the main road, instinctively gripping my phone a little tighter as I do so.
Increasingly, by small and imperceptible degrees, we seem to live in a world defined by petty theft; petty not in its scale or volume but by its sense of entitlement and impunity. A joke, a phone, an article, the island of Greenland, the entire canon of published literature, a bag of dishwasher tablets: everything, it seems, is fair game. How did we get to this point, and where does it lead us?
Perhaps we should start on the internet, where technology has essentially legitimised and embedded stealing into our shared digital culture. Aggregator websites, viral meme accounts, screenshots, copy and paste, the abundance and ubiquity of the feed: all these serve to blur the relationship between the creator and creation, sweeping up our ideas, thoughts and pictures into a common buffet. It feels frictionless, victimless, even empowering. The rewards for virality are high and the penalties almost nonexistent.
And so when the first generative AI models started training themselves on billions of items of scraped content – copyrighted writing, music and art – in a sense they were simply following in an established tradition. There was, writes Karen Hao in her book Empire of AI, “a culture among developers to view anything and everything as data to be captured and consumed”. John Phelan of the International Confederation of Music Publishers describes it as “the largest intellectual property theft in human history”.
But there are no police on the scene, no screaming sirens, no bounties and “wanted” posters. If big tech wants your stuff, and governments around the world want to let them have it, there is no emergency number to call, just a fog of obfuscations and plaintive wailing about the viability of the business model. Please, my family is starving. My family loves to eat private photos and personal data. Also, my family is allergic to copyright law.
But, of course, the internet did not invent all of this. Theft itself is as old as time, perhaps one of the oldest human behaviours of all: a strategy of adaptation and learned imitation driven above all by asymmetries of…
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