To Whom Does the World Belong?

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.

By Alexander Hartley —completing a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard.

Boston Review (December 2024)

In the case of AI, it is once again intellectual property law that builds the wall and locks the gate that protect corporate ownership of the technology. But what has been made using law can be changed using law. This is the startling reality of intellectual property, as distinct even from physical forms of ownership. Ungoverned by physics, unenforceable by hired guards and private armies, IP law is serenely unconstrained by nonhuman reality, a purely human and purely social creation; its rules and contours map nothing more or less than the shape of a collective human will. We will only find and exercise this will if we remember that law exists to serve human welfare, not to enforce “natural” rights. At the dawn of the era of artificial intelligence, citizens have to ask: Will we allow our way of life to be dominated by an unholy alliance between a technology of the future and a concept of authorship–ownership that is centuries out of date? Or will we exercise our collective will to ensure that the technology conforms to our own concepts of the good life? —https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/to-whom-does-the-world-belong/