Essay:Intellectual property in the times of AI

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by CriticalResist
Published: 2025 (last update: 2025-11-05)
25-40 minutes

TBD

The five arguments of anti-AI

In this essay, I will not coddle communists. You are not babies, and do not need me to use baby words to make the AI pill easier to swallow. Yet, this is often what we are forced to do to make any point about AI. There are many, many things to discuss about AI (both good and bad!), and we'll get into them. But most of the time, AI revolves around five arguments:

You stop using your brain,
It's bad for the environment,
It's not actually art/it looks bad,
It's a bubble,
It destroys jobs (to address)

Making any discussion outside of these five hot topics impossible. I know that by pointing out these arguments and responding to them I will invite discussions on them when my point here is to talk about intellectual property, but I feel I couldn't properly talk about IP laws if I didn't address these arguments first. This is because at its core, these arguments come from a place of not wanting to actually struggle with the problem. Rather, some people seem to think that if they ignore AI (the ostrich technique) or deride it and its perceived proponents enough, it will suddenly go away.

But clearly AI is not going away - you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. This isn't a crypto or NFT situation, this is something that over a billion people have used in their daily life already, and keep adopting. And not only that, but there is a very overlooked open-source ecosystem. If you were somehow able to stop AI completely (which would also mean stopping research into neural networks, including those that do medical research), what would happen to the models living on people's machines right now? They will still exist and still be usable. Go on civitai or huggingface right now and look at all the models coming out: this has been going on for 3 years and keeps improving.

Therefore as communists we must struggle with the topic, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, to find its dialectic and resolve the contradiction, which will bring a third, new thing. As communists we have had to struggle with many things before, and we will continue to do so. We can't abdicate as soon as something is too difficult to wrap our head around. We don't have the luxury of saying "I'm just not that interested in this" because the bourgeoisie isn't saying this. Every moment we refuse to contend with AI, the bourgeoisie is making more models, pumping more money, building more datacenters.

This also answers the fourth argument: it's a bubble. Yes, AI in the West (we'll come back to this) is a bubble. It's similar to the dot com boom of the early 2000s: huge, risky investment for a potential future payoff that does not seem to be coming. But overvaluation is not new, and we see that after the dot com bust, the Internet did not go away. Rather what happened was that some companies disappeared, and their property, talent and infrastructure was acquired by what are now today's giants: Amazon, Google (now Alphabet), eBay, Cisco, and even Nvidia. They acquired talent and property on the cheap during the bust phase and now decide for us what goes on on the Internet, Amazon and Google especially.

The boom and bust cycle was clearly laid out by Marx. A new market arises, capital floods it and tons of new companies open (the boom phase), overproduction lowers the rate of profit, several of these companies go bankrupt and we enter the bust phase. But an equally very important part of Marx's analysis is that not all companies go bankrupt. Those that remain solidify their position in the market, and become monopolies. The boom and bust cycle doesn't just explain economic crises but also the tendency of capitalism to form monopolies.

The belief that AI will go away after the bubble pops is supported neither by theory nor by historical examples. Not only will open-source models still exist and be available after the burst, not only will research into neural networks still take place (by very skilled scientists, which are often completely left out of the conversation), but what will happen is AI will get consolidated into fewer companies. And yes, I do believe AI in the West is an overinflated bubble, predicated on capitalism's own contradictions (the inherent 'anarchy of production' as Engels said and the incessant need to always open up new markets because of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall): they are trying to make it profitable and pumping money into it to get a return on investment. But it's just not that profitable, as Chinese models show.

When Deepseek-r1 came out in January of this year, it completely destroyed the western model of the AI market. Deepseek is a smaller model, that came out of nowhere (the parent company is a trading company, so not in AI or even the tech sector), trained on 5-10 million dollars versus the 100 million USD openAI swears high and low it needs. Suddenly, the investment doesn't seem viable and people are realizing they got taken in by capitalist promises. We will come back to China's research and usage of AI later.

Once again, we have no choice but to struggle with the subject if we want to be effective around it. Therefore, I will also need to take on the four other arguments.

Let's get the simple ones out of the way: they also said TV would fry my brain and we shouldn't have a calculator in our pocket at all times. What we found instead is that people adapt to new conditions, and have done so for millenia. Do I also stop using my brain when I use a lighter to light a campfire instead of rubbing sticks together? Is this a required skill to have to live in the 21st-century?

Many arguments brought against AI today have been made historically, and found insufficient by the dialectics of time. Some people were also opposed to electrification when it came out -- though a lot of it was spurred by the gas lobby. What we found instead is that gas companies started getting into the electricity market when the writing was on the wall. Today, anyone saying they would rather go back to gas artificial lightning over LED lightbulbs would not be taken seriously. Is AI the electric lightbulb? Not necessarily. But maybe it could be. It is clear however that having a kneejerk reaction to it, in either direction, will not seriously answer the question: both from the capitalists that swear it will do everything (LLMs clearly don't and neural networks in general still need more research into them to find emergent uses), and from the comrades that think it does nothing whatsoever (we use it a lot to code front-end stuff on ProleWiki which improves the reading experience of our readers, to name just one usecase. If you use a custom font or the sepia theme while reading this essay, you are using code written by AI).

In the same way, I don't like using the word Luddite. The luddites were a historical movement that do not exist in our current conditions: it's an easy cop-out to not have to make a point. But we need to make arguments, and we need to make them sooner rather than later. But to do that, we need to abandon kneejerk reactions and treat our comrades on an equal level, and one side is more guilty of this than the other. In fact, I do expect many of these reactions to this essay.

This brings me to the next point: AI art looks bad.

So did the first human paintings on the caves of walls. So do my own illustrations. Again, I use art to mean all art forms, but this argument is usually reserved for illustrative work especially. It's a microcosm that prevents us from looking at the big picture. In fact, generative AI may be able to help circle around IP laws. The actual effect it will have is difficult to predict and we don't have any hope of capitalism doing the right thing, of course, but to me this is a much more important argument to have than "it cheapens art because it looks bad". The only answer I can give at this stage is, so what? What has this argument changed in the past 3 years it's been used? Facebook is rife with terrible AI images passed off as real because they opened monetization recently, and so everyone is trying to post as often as possible to get as many impressions as possible to make as much money as possible. Models are getting better and better at generating images, to the point that some look absolutely lifelike. Clearly, the technology is improving, not stagnating. This is an image generated by a local, open-source model using only my own GPU:

Does it have artefacts? Yes, probably. The text probably makes no sense and I'm sure looking deep enough into it you might notice some things that are not natural. There's not really a background and the grain of the table looks a bit fake. But it also looks very realistic, and this is where we're at now. 3 years ago image models could not even get books right.

This is what you have to contend with if you want to remain anti-AI. The ecosystem is developing and moving with or without you. Even if we were to ban AI, even if we were to break up openAI, Grok, Gemini, and whatever else exists commercially, even if you stopped all research into AI, even if you think 40 seconds to generate this book cover on a wooden tabletop is simply outrageous, you will not be able to remove this model from thousands of people's machines. It will be able to keep creating images like these for decades. This didn't even take that long to generate; 40-50 seconds on my machine and only because this model, Flux, is a bit heavier. Usually, generation takes only 13 seconds on my GPU, an RTX 4060 that anyone can get at any store. 13 seconds for a 1024x1024px image.

This is the reality we are now in, and coincidentally also allows me to answer the environmental aspect: first, there is currently research being published that severely reduces the environmental impact needed to train and run AI. Just recently, Alibaba (who trains Qwen) found an algorithm to squeeze more models on GPUs, reducing the amount of graphics cards needed by 82% in their datacenter. Secondly, once the model is made, these 13 seconds of my GPU being used to make a picture amount to literally 0 watts spent. Open-source AI is clearly the way forward, as all software is -- but we'll get back to that as well.

"AI images look bad" is an old tired argument that people just don't care about outside of specific circles. Not all illustrative work is meant to look good. Some is just meant to accompany a blog post, or fill up space in a PowerPoint. Not all illustrative work is art, plainly speaking. First of all because there cannot be true art in capitalism (its nature as a commodity to be bought and sold will always overtake the artistic aspect), and secondly because not everything is inherently art on virtue of being drawn. As a graphic designer, I never thought that the logos and designs I made were art in any way: they exist to convey a marketing intent. We make logos, flyers and videos to get you to buy something, not to hang on your wall and admire. This is why I separate illustrative work from art.

Prior to AI we had stock pictures and spec work -- coming from a graphic design background I am very familiar with those two. Stock photos had the reputation of looking bad, nonsensical, and devoid of anything interesting (which artists now call 'soulless', despite that as materialists we understand the soul doesn't actually exist and so clearly the problem is not a lack of soul but something else that anti-AI people will have to find if they want this argument to stay relevant).

All of this ties in with the idea that AI "destroys jobs". If only we showed people that AI images are worse than human artists, then we could save illustrators! But that is not how capitalists think. They don't think it looks better, they think it's much cheaper

Taking a step back from all of these symptoms of AI image gen, we see that the problem is capitalism. It's never been AI itself. Of course AI in capitalism is used to trick people; scams and con artists are nothing new. Why do people post AI images on their monetized facebook page? Because they want to make money. And Facebook itself is not doing well since TikTok came out, and so monetization is their answer to try and retain eyeballs on their website (along with infinite scrolling). It's anti-user behavior from Facebook.

We already have to solution to all of these problems: socialism. On ProleWiki, everything we do is in service to the reader. Our design and development philosophy is to make the website more customizable, more able to answer your needs. We don't want you to spend several minutes trying to find the page you're looking for because this allows us to serve more ads (cough cough Google Search); we don't serve ads, we don't ask for your money, and we don't need to maximize your time spent to please investors that don't exist. Our use of AI on ProleWiki is completely different than how it's used by tech companies. And yet, we cannot excise ourselves from capitalism no more than forming a commune in the woods is socialism: open-source models, as interesting as they are, often depend on proprietary models for their training. Capitalist companies themselves make heavy use of open-source code which they reuse for free, and sometimes even extinguish (in this way this is not so different from IP laws around characters and series.)

Yet, this shows that AI does have a place in socialism and communism. Maybe not a society-transforming place, but a place nonetheless.

Capitalism destroys anything good before it even has a chance to begin, but that is not new. In AI research there are very smart and skilled people who want to do good things, only to find their research misappropriated to squeeze just a little bit more profits out of this late-stage capitalism hellscape we are in.

AI and intellectual property

As previously mentioned, Chinese models are accelerating the death warrant for overvalued western tech companies. Project Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure intiative launched by Trump in the US, died two weeks later when DeepSeek came out and needed only 5 million dollars and spare GPU power to train. Incidentally, DeepSeek -- and most Chinese models -- is completely open-source, and they are contributing a lot to open software development. This has repercussions not just in AI but in all software. Research often pays off years later, only becoming fully relevant in time. Therefore, to stifle research into AI is to close ourselves off from potentially

Let's talk about training AI. I would ask a question. It is often remarked (and not wrongfully) that we want AI to do our chores so we can focus on our art, but it turned out AI is doing our art so we can do our chores. And yet, how is AI supposed to do our laundry if it can't recognize a laundry basket and use your laundry machine? How will the dirty laundry find itself in the washing machine, and the program started? Certainly you might not need a fully humanoid robot to lift the basket and turn on the washing machine,

Therefore we need to train AI to have vision (a way to understand what an image depicts, either a photograph or a frame from a video feed), and this vision must be trained - just like ours. We didn't come into this world knowing what a laundry basket is, someone had to teach us. We do the same with AI. We teach it to recognize a laundry basket, and this requires that it has access to enough training data on laundry baskets, but also forks, knives, cats, basically everything that exists in this world that we take for granted.

Will we ever have AI do our chores in capitalism? Not if it's not profitable (which is looking increasingly likely as the bust phase approaches rapidly). Is the answer that we should therefore

Meanwhile, Chinese company Unitree is releasing humanoid robots that range from 10 to 70 thousand dollars, and you can get one delivered to your doorstep. At this stage the industry is in its very early birth, and these robots come only with an SDK, that is, it has no functions or code within it but only the capability to run your custom code. If you want your Unitree bot to go get something from the fridge for example, you will have to install a vision model that understands what a fridge is, and code the robot to open the fridge in some way.

Like I said, research often only pays off years later. Maybe humanoid robots are not that good at doing chores and we'll end up making a flatbed robot that carries your laundry basket, but it's good that someone is looking into it. This reminds me of the nuclear issue, which is also a hot topic in Europe. Europe has basically decided to abandon nuclear without having anything to replace it with. Germany, once a big producer of nuclear energy, has reopened coal plants to satisfy their energy demand. There is now a huge energy crisis looming in Europe. Most people's argument against nuclear is that it's not safe enough, but no energy source is - in fact, nuclear is the safest when comparing historical deaths data (coal doesn't come out of thin air). Another reason nuclear is not "safe" is because we stopped researching nuclear tech in the 70s, and our plants are from that era. But with more research, much of which is done in Iran and China, we see that we can make nuclear more efficient and safer. Modern reactors are essentially meltdown-proof, and the Fukushima disaster happened because it was built right next to the sea in a country known for earthquakes and tsunamis, because it was cheaper than pumping the seawater further inland. Profits above people.

Nuclear is just one thing. With more research into AI, who knows what will come out of it? And it's not just AI either, obviously.

But this is exactly what intellectual property stifles.

What prompted me to write this essay is that I see many people in anti-AI circles cheer when a big name like George R.R. Martin or Shueisha (publisher of Shonen Jump magazine in which many famous licences like One Piece, Naruto or Dragon Ball originated) are suing AI companies over perceived copyright infringement.

And this isn't just liberals and apoliticals; many self-proclaimed communists also cheer for these lawsuits that, they hope, will take down AI, even accepting some adverse effects in the process if it means the end of AI -- which, as we have seen, due to the prevalence of open-source AI this is simply a pipe dream, even if these IP companies won their lawsuits, the models on people's machine would still exist and be usable. It's like trying to remove a film you have downloaded from your hard drive.

In just 3 short years, we have gone from "abolish private property" to "actually maybe some copyright is good". But copyright law has never been made to protect the small artist against unauthorized use of their work. That is not its purpose. In every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class - in other words, bourgeois law protects the bourgeoisie, starting all the way back to the first copyright laws down to the situation we are in today, where Disney has extensively lobbied to extend copyright to 75 years after the author's death so they could keep making money off Mickey Mouse.

There are many different arguments all coalescing around these lawsuits, the first of which is that when Shueisha is attacking openAI, this is inter-bourgeois fighting. But it still bears consequences for us proles, not only legally but also as an analytical tool to refine our own stance on copyright and AI.

The first thing to note is that these lawsuits often rule in favor of the AI company. This is because the companies bringing these lawsuits, most of which are in the entertainment industry, argue on the training of the model. Currently, training takes place by giving a model trillions of images/texts to work on, so that it can learn to recognize patterns. In LLMs, the model starts to learn which words tend to follow each other.

But this isn't simply a Markov Chain or pattern-matching like any "dumb" program can already do. Through this process, the AI creates a neural network of its own, often referred to as the 'black box'. This network only speaks to the model: it learns to create it itself through the training process. Here is an example of what a neural network might look like:

Deepseek-r1 is also named "Deepseek:671B", with the B indicating how many neurons it has (in this case 671 billion). When recalling information, LLMs don't simply copy and paste from their training data -- an argument that was propagated early on but has now thankfully been abandoned. When you send Deepseek a prompt, the data transits through its 671B neurons to create an output token. How exactly your prompt travels through the neural network is for the LLM to decide.

Image generation works similarly, and if you're interested in how I recommend this Youtube video from Computerphile narrated by Dr Mike Pound who is, incidentally, very excited about Deepseek and other open-source Chinese models because it allows him to do a lot of research in his field for which he publishes academic papers. The short of it is you train a model to recognize images (the prerequisite for Vision, i.e. to make a chores robot recognize the dirty laundry from the clean) and you train another model to fool the former. Images are created from random gaussian noise, the same white noise that used to be on cathode TVs when you tuned to a channel that didn't exist. The model that creates the image also use a neural network (several in fact at different points of their training), but differently from LLMs. Early on when commercial image models appeared, a common argument I saw against them was that they "paste" thousands of images together to create an output, but this is not true: they learn to undo the gaussian noise on a picture by creating their own neural network. Then, when making an image from scratch, they start with what was only ever random noise. Therefore, AI does not copy existing material: the training data is not even located within the model, only the resulting neural network is.

So far, the courts have found the IP companies' argument that training AI constitutes copyright infringement. Rather, the courts believe it falls under fair use - and I think that's a very important point to note.

For one, I made sure to use the word neural network in the paragraphs above because you are very intimate with one of those: your own brain. The human brain works on a network of neurons, i.e. it's a neural network. AI may "only" be an approximation of the human neural network (much like a camera is only an approximation of our own eyes but I digress), but let me ask this question: if IP companies successfully stop AI training in court, what stops them from coming after you? After all, in the process of learning to draw your own Ghibli scene on Krita, you had to study the Ghibli style, activating your neurons and "training" yourself to then draw that style.

We know full well that IP companies want to be your sole provided for their IP. This is why they create it in the first place: they wouldn't make it (under a capitalist context) if there was no way to make money from it. If Shonen Jump wins its lawsuit against OpenAI, what would stop them from coming after you for drawing One Piece fan art, how would you prove it's not AI, how would you find the money to defend yourself in court, if they wanted to use that argument?

This is not far-fetched. Nintendo is a well-known litigator over IP, to the point that they believe they own the whole monster-taming genre (Pokémon). They have brought emulator developers to court and won, even forcing a man to pay back the millions Nintendo "feels" they lost to him hacking the Switch for others. Yet in many cases, these emulators are the only way to play old video games that Nintendo only sits on and refuses to make available, simply because they don't believe it's a worthwhile investment from their part.

There are two things to keep in mind: 1- yes, this is "only" entertainment and there are more important things going on in the world, and we'll talk about them. But to that, 2- a lot of people want these IP companies to win "even if it's the end of fanfic writers" (said to me). It's losing sight of the big picture for a kneejerk reaction against AI. And clearly, even if entertainment licences are not 'important', they certainly are important enough to litigate over.

I feel there's been an entire reversal of copyright and intellectual property, where suddenly self-proclaimed communists side with big companies just to stick it to AI. It feels completely backwards. It's not just about making One Piece fan art on DeviantArt that only 30 people will ever see, it's about making IP free to use and remix. This is why we have Creative Commons licences. This is why we have fair use. Fair use has been used for decades by small creators of all kinds (including software developers and researchers) to create things, as it's the only tool we have to curtail copyright.

One can certainly argue that it's a slippery slope argument to claim that we will lose fair use simply over an AI lawsuit. It may be, but the point is that this is what IP companies are attempting to do when they bring these lawsuits. These companies already make heavy use of open-source and even copyrighted work, including fan artwork (for example Zara, the clothing brand, was repeatedly found to have stolen designs without compensation and attribution to put on their t-shirts), without compensation. Microsoft is notorious for relying on open-source code. They like these inputs when it suits them, and want to control them when it doesn't, because capitalism. And they know they can get away with it because they have money for lawsuits and you don't.

What proponents of these lawsuits will have to explain is: beyond "destroying AI", what exactly do they think these lawsuits achieve that's beneficial to them?

Shueisha has no leg to stand on in its lawsuits against Sora (the video generation tool recently released by OpenAI) because a- the training process has already been litigated and found to be fair use and b- the output is not a copy of a One Piece episode, it wasn't lifted off a DVD or anything. Therefore it's transformative.

But if they manage to attack the transformative aspect, then they can reinforce copyright and IP law by setting a precedent. And you're still not going to be protected if you are a creative, because you don't have the money to scour the web to find copyright infringement and litigate it in court. But Shueisha will be very happy to come after you for drawing One Piece fan art for a commission (and then probably steal it for their own promo art).

And IP is more than just One Piece and A Song of Ice and Fire. IP is also software, medication (through patents), even game mechanics or even shapes (the Nike swoosh). These all form intellectual property. And yes, ironically, chatGPT models are also intellectual property.

I feel with the advent of commercial AI I now have to argue for basic liberation of IP that the USSR had settled a hundred years ago already. I feel I now have to explain why communists should not want copyright to exist. Like I said earlier, Dr. Mike Pound is very excited for Chinese AI models that are open-source, because he can use them in research freely. He can fine-tune their training for his needs and create things. I don't know what research Dr. Pound is involved with currently, but I know that neural networks have already been used in the medical field to help analyze radio imagery and detect diseases. In China, neural networks are being deployed right now for what is called 'precision farming': AI-supported irrigation and fertilization systems that deliver nutrients based on real-time soil data. This boosts soil health, fights against soil degradation, and ensures food safety.

These models don't come out of nowhere: they rely on a whole host of prior open-source research and software packages that are freely accessible and usable. China, working under a socialist system completely different from the capitalist one we know, embraces open software, and they are now leading in the AI race. In fact, the five most popular open-source AI models are all Chinese.

It's no wonder that the global south is adopting AI, yet the anti-AI crowd mostly wants to focus on openAI who, while being a major player at the forefront of AI innovation, is also only a tiny part of a much bigger ecosystem that transcends IP and borders. It's missing the forest for the trees, literally. Iran recently published academic guidelines surrounding the use of AI (as related to me by a fellow ProleWiki editor currently studying in Iran): they allow LLM use provided the student notes the model and time of usage, and can prove they understand the material. Cuba is working on making its own Large Language Model.

When I brought this up to an (admittedly random) communist, they dismissed it, saying that "China is wrong", period. To them, the matter was settled. No struggle is even needed: they know more than anyone else. That is not the correct stance to take, nor is it to proclaim "China does everything right!". The correct stance is to ask: what do they see in AI that we don't?

The agricultural usage of AI in China for example makes sense when one considers that 1- they have to feed 1.5 billion people, 2- they have to develop self-sufficiency in everything as sanctions have been enacted against AES and countries that go against the imperial order, and c- prior to the establishment of the People's Republic, famines used to hit China every 10-20 years. It makes perfect sense then why China would want to put effort into AI. And because the system works for the people and not for corporations, success is determined not in quarterly returns or how many 20$/month subscription tiers they sell, but in how much agricultural output has increased.

The same can be said of Iran. Under heavy sanctions, they have to find ways to develop rapidly. Any time Iran does some research into nuclear (so they can build reactors and medical imagery devices), the US enacts more sanctions against them. The USSR did the same (albeit under different circumstances): in two generations, the USSR went from a post-feudal country with an entrenched nobility to beating the Nazis to going into space. An argument I sometimes still see around AI is "we don't need it anyway", but that's true of everything - we don't even need fire if you want to go this way. But the point is, had the USSR said "we don't need the steam machine to work the fields, the serf system has served us well for hundreds of years" they would have never caught up with the huge gap between Russia and the West.

Is AI existential for the global south? That extent remains to be seen. But what's pretty certain at this point is that AI is not going away (chiefly because you cannot legislate what happens outside of your borders), and to take ourselves out of the conversation regarding AI on grounds that it's icky or we don't like it is only ceding ground to the bourgeoisie that will and is using it right now. It's like the advent of missile warfare when the first missiles came out: it was certainly a huge game changer on the battlefield, and missiles are certainly used to kill people, but to refuse to use them too because "missiles are scary" (i.e. moral grounds) means that you will not be able to fight against the enemy effectively. What we need to do with AI is to study it, struggle with it, and reach a proletarian line on it that counters the bourgeois line on AI.

I used an AI picture of Samuel Jackson as Lenin as the image to this essay because it illustrates my point: it is onto us to find how to make best use of this technology. The image in question was posted on the subreddit r/AIArt where it's one of the best-rated post (1439 upvotes), and they are not communists by any stretch. Even communists who are usually anti-AI responded well to this image when it came out. My point is that there is agitprop potential in there, on top of what I already said about how we use it when developing for ProleWiki. Moreover I think a lot of people will change their mind on AI if they start using it (I know I did), and perhaps that's what they're scared of. But as communists, we can't afford to be scared. If we were, then we wouldn't believe communism is possible.