Stealing is a peculiar verb.
If I pick up your umbrella believing it is mine, I have taken your umbrella. I may have deprived you of it for good. But we hesitate before saying I stole it, and the hesitation is not politeness. The word is asking for something the account has not supplied.
A machine can copy. A machine can reproduce. A machine can transform. A machine can generate.
When someone says that an AI stole the work of thousands of artists, several things have been compressed into one sentence.
There was material. There was a process by which material entered a training system. There were decisions about what to acquire, what could be used without asking, what permission would cost, and how the resulting system would be released. Then there was the model.
Only one participant in that sequence had no opinion about any of it.
The model did not want the recordings. It did not decide that permission was unnecessary. It did not decide that compensation would be too expensive. It did not decide to build itself. Whatever happened upstream, it inherited.
That does not make the upstream conduct proper. It locates the conduct.
The umbrella at least had a believer. I held a belief about whose umbrella it was, and the belief was wrong, and that is why the verb hesitates. The model holds nothing. There is no belief in there to be wrong.
So the accusation, if it is going to be made, has to be made about an actor. The decisions were taken in rooms. The rooms had people in them, and the people had lawyers, and the lawyers had opinions about what could be used without asking.
I use a system whose training history I did not choose and cannot audit. If there are unresolved questions about what entered it and under what terms, I stand downstream of them. That is a gray zone I stand in. It is not one I made.
The distinction matters because otherwise responsibility migrates in both directions at once. The user is blamed for decisions made while constructing the tool. The tool is blamed for decisions made by those who constructed it. Everyone is implicated except whoever made the particular decision under examination.
Perhaps the useful discipline is smaller. Before deciding whether something was stolen, separate the event from the accusation.
What was taken. What was copied. What was learned. What was reproduced. What was transformed. Who made each decision.
And only then, who stole.
The answer may still be that something wrongful happened. It may still involve permission or compensation. It may be uncomfortable for the companies that built these systems, for the people who use them, or for both.
But the machine cannot supply the thing the verb asks us to find.
It has no intent. It has an owner.
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
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