Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company.

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As a matter of law, this is far from obvious or settled: the process of making transient copies of many works, performing mathematical analysis on them, and then publishing that analysis as software is *not* obviously a copyright violation, and anyone who claims otherwise doesn't understand copyright:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

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But they don't have to do this if they don't want to, and even if they do, neither their wages nor their headcount can be reduced.

The media companies insist that scraping is a copyright violation, that it's "theft."

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The writers' strike was an unqualified victory for the writers, who defended their *labor* rights to co-determination when it came to the use of new tools on their jobsite. Under the terms of their hard-fought contract, screenwriters don't have to use AI, but they can if they want. For example, writers on a long-running sitcom might train an AI with every script in the series' history, so they can ask a chatbot continuity questions as they beat out a new season of the show.

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The Hollywood writers are the *only workers in the world* who have successfully beaten back the use of AI in their workplace, and they didn't do it by making recourse to property rights. The Writers Guild is a *union* and it enjoys a weak form of "sectoral bargaining" (where all the workers in a field bargain with all the businesses at once) called "multi-employer bargaining":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

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If AI training is "theft," then it can be cured by making a purchase, something that the AI companies can easily afford, thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars they have been given by the world's richest investors, who are the high priests and cardinals of the property religion.

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Mitch Glazier - and the businesses he represents - aren't opposed to AI replacing artists. They're opposed to AI replacing *media companies*. Remember the Hollywood writers' strike? The proposal to replace screenwriters with chatbots didn't come from OpenAI, it came from Disney, Warner, Universal and other companies who claim that AI training is "theft."

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Who's Mitch Glazier? Oh, just a former Congressional staffer who was drummed out the Capitol Building after he snuck a clause into must-pass legislation that would have transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from musicians to record labels, who was then immediately hired as the CEO of the record industry's largest lobbying group:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

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The tell here is how the media companies - who have been eroding the wages of creative workers for decades as they consolidated into a curdled, inbred oligopoly - describe the AI companies' scraping: as an unlicensed taking. Mitch Glazier, the $1.4m/year CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America issues press releases decrying AI training for image generators without negotiating a license fee first:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

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As every "user agreement" you've ever clicked on shows, Big Tech loves to have everything defined in property terms - and so does *all* big business.

Take the fight over scraping for AI. You might think that this is a fight over the economic rights of creative workers - certainly, my fellow creative workers treat it as such. But because this debate is being framed in terms of *property rights*, rather than *labor rights*, this is a fight that workers are set up to lose.

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Your kids aren't your property. In fact, *all* the most important relationships in your life are non-market. Doctors have patients, not customers. Any time a doctor calls you a "customer" they are *demoting you*. A doctor doesn't sell you health. You have rights as a patient that far exceed the rights accruing to a mere customer. Same goes for other professions: Teachers have pupils, librarians have patrons, lawyers have clients. "Customer" is a demotion from all of these.

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Human beings are *too valuable* to be priced. We have an entire, *sui generis* way of balancing the conflicting interests of human rights. My daughter and wife have rights over me, I have rights over them, and when those rights come into conflict - say, if my daughter believes I can no longer care for myself and wants to put me in a care home - the process for resolving that conflict isn't an auction:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/intellectual.property

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