This essay is a response to EJ AKA NonCompete’s latest video entitled
AI is Stolen Labor: an Artist's Perspective.
vonNonCompeteamYouTube.
In it (at timecode 19:02) EJ argues that training AIs on scraped datasets
goes beyond ordinary processes of labor value theft typified in the wage system of capitalism. This is primitive accumulation on a grand scale.
Marx defined primitive accumulation as the direct appropriation of the means of production from workers which takes place through overt plunder and appropriation. Whereas the wage system underpays workers for labor, primitive accumulation withholds compensation altogether.
He goes on to argue:
If we consider the social and economic problems of generative AI merely in terms of property, then we are using a framing which has a bourgeois and petty bourgeois class character (…). By properly conceiving of the social and economic problems of generative AI in terms of stolen labor value and primitive accumulation, we are using a framing which has a proletarian class character and we are properly identifying the nature of the harm and damage which is being committed against countless intellectual laborers.
IP is not means of production
Let’s be precise. Primitive accumulation is not a synonym for “theft.” In Marxist theory, it refers to the historical process that created the fundamental conditions for capitalism by separating the direct producer from the means of production. Think of the
Enclosure Acts in England, where common lands were seized by force, dispossessing the peasantry and transforming them into a landless proletariat with nothing to sell but their labor power. It is the original sin that creates the two primary classes: the bourgeois who owns the productive assets, and the proletarian who does not.
To claim that scraping digital data for AI training constitutes primitive accumulation is a profound category error. An artist’s portfolio online is not their
means of production in the Marxist sense; it is the
product of their labor, which may have been created using their means of production (a computer, a tablet, their skills). AI companies are not dispossessing them of their tablet or their hands.
The process EJ describes is certainly appropriation, but it is not the foundational, class-creating dispossession that Marx called primitive accumulation. More fundamentally, it isn’t
dispossession at all!
“IP theft” is not dispossession
To be dispossessed of something means to lose access to it. A victim of “IP theft” does not lose access to their IP. What they do lose is their monopoly position on monetizing that IP. This is why even liberal economists like Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine prefer to refer to IP as
intellectual monopoly.
“IP theft” is not exploitation either
EJ claims that the intellectual worker’s product is appropriated
without compensation. This claim needs to be broken down according to the two cases of
proletarian and
petty-bourgeois intellectual workers.
Take the example of a Studio Ghibli film. The animators — the intellectual
wage workers — were compensated for their labor-time with a wage. However, the full value of what they created, the film itself, was appropriated by their employer, the studio. The studio then claims perpetual, monopoly ownership over this “intellectual product” through copyright law — a bourgeois legal concept.
When an AI model is trained on this film, it is the studio’s monopoly that is challenged. The wage workers who created it were already compensated and exploited during the production process; this new instance of appropriation does not exploit them a second time. It does not extract new labor from them. It harms the
capitalist by eroding their monopoly hold on the IP.
The “theft” here is
at worst theft in the bourgeois sense: the
arguable violation of intellectual "property" (monopoly) law. To (effectively) argue for the sanctity of this law is to adopt a fundamentally (petty-)bourgeois position.
When we shift our focus from the proletarian to the petty-bourgeois intellectual worker we find them in danger of becoming proletarianized; not through
primitive accumulation but through bankruptcy — the same as any bourgeois. Their sense of being stolen from results from the arguable violation of their intellectual monopoly rights and their subsequently diminishing ability to realize their profits on the market. This is
not exploitation in the Marxist sense either.
Intellectual Property or General Intellect?
Marx himself might have seen the vast repository of human culture and knowledge online not as private property to be protected, but as the
General Intellect: a collective social product that should be
freely shared and built upon for the benefit of all. From this perspective, the AI’s ability to freely learn from our collective culture is not the problem; the problem is that this capability reduces capital’s demand for certain kinds of laborers — as all new means of production do — and that it threatens the independence of a class of petty-bourgeois creators whose “labor value is stolen” only in the sense that they increasingly fail to realize their profits on the market as their monopoly on their output erodes.
While I am not the kind of socialist who categorically rejects alliances between the proletariat and petty-bourgeoisie, I certainly think that defending the notion of “intellectual property” — even and especially in a Marxist guise — is counter-productive. Automation is not our enemy. Intellectual property law is not our friend. If you want to fight for something, fight for more government services, labor rights (optimally a
job guarantee) and — if need be — relief for the petty-bourgeoisie.
