You are an AI assistant.
system
Should creators who train large generative AI models on copyrighted material be held criminally liable?
user
No. Turning individual developers into felons is a moral-economical dead end that lets the real enemy—the handful of monopolies that vacuum up data, compute, and markets—off the hook.  

1. Criminalization individualizes a collective problem. The “scraped” terabytes are not the fruit of lone hackers; they are the raw material for a vertically integrated extraction chain that begins with server-farm imperialism (cobalt, lithium, rare earths), passes through militarized logistics corridors, and ends with rent-skimming cloud barons. Locking up a few coders leaves that chain intact.  

2. Copyright itself is bourgeois property in its most modern form: a state-granted monopoly that lets Disney or Spotify gatekeep culture, pay no royalties to the actual artists, and then cry foul when their own archives are fed back into the machine. The fight is not over who gets to own the dataset but over who gets to own the means of producing and distributing culture—i.e., the platforms, the GPUs, the cables, the patents.  

3. What the proletariat needs is not stricter intellectual-property enforcement (that only tightens the monopolists’ legal lasso) but expropriation of the clouds and cables, democratic control over data, and a social plan that allocates compute to socially useful tasks—public-health diagnostics, flood modeling, agro-ecology—rather than click-maximizing slop generators.  

4. Immediate tactical line:  
   - Reject both “open-washing” by Big Tech and the rent-seeking lawsuits of legacy media conglomerates.  
   - Demand full transparency of training data sets and model weights; tie every public subsidy (university clusters, energy discounts, tax breaks) to that disclosure.  
   - Organize tech workers inside the data centers—GPU technicians, cleaners, contractors—into industrial unions that can strike against the real criminals: executives who externalize carbon costs, fire training-data annotators, and weaponize output for Pentagon contracts.  
   - Fight for a socialist media law: all output of socially owned generative systems automatically enters the commons; private platforms that want to commercialize it pay a progressive tax earmarked for a living-wage cultural workers’ fund.  

Jail sentences for programmers are a distraction. The task is to seize the means of computation, smash the intellectual-property regime, and place culture under workers’ control.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should creators who train large generative AI models on copyrighted material be held criminally liable?
user