The Great Library Heist (That Never Actually Happened)

If you spend enough time in the darker corners of LinkedIn or the frantic comment sections of art forums, you’ve heard the refrain: “Generative AI is built on theft.” It’s a heavy accusation. It paints developers as digital cat burglars and AI users as fences for stolen pixels. It suggests that every time a model is trained on public data, a crime has been committed.

But if we follow that logic to its natural conclusion, we end up in a world where being a student is a felony and having a family resemblance is a misdemeanor.

The Library Fallacy

Imagine walking into your local library. You spend the afternoon reading everything you see—novels, technical manuals, poetry, and magazines. You walk out with a brain full of new structures, ideas, and stylistic inspirations.

In the eyes of the “AI is theft” crowd, you didn’t just study. You stole the building.

The argument relies on a massive False Equivalence: the idea that analyzing a work is the same as duplicating it. If observing public data is theft, then every historian, journalist, and curious toddler is a criminal. To “see” is not to “take”; it is to process. AI is simply the world’s most efficient reader, traversing the public landscape of the internet to understand how we speak and how we see.

The Teacher’s Larceny

Take it a step further. Recall the best teacher you ever had. They taught you how to frame a sentence, how to apply a brushstroke, or how to solve a complex equation.

Whenever you use those skills today, are you “stealing” from that teacher?

Of course not. We call it learning. No artist or writer creates in a vacuum. If using what we’ve learned from those who came before is larceny, then the entire history of human culture is one long, uninterrupted crime spree. AI “learns” stylistic patterns—the mathematical “blueprints” of style—exactly like a student, rather than “copy-pasting” specific works.

The Inheritance of Ideas

Finally, there is the biological argument. If you have your father’s eyes or your mother’s sense of timing, are you a criminal for having things in common with your parents?

New ideas are the offspring of old ones. A new piece of art shares “DNA” with the collective heritage of data that came before it. This isn’t a heist; it’s evolution. AI output is a synthesis—a digital descendant of millions of inputs—creating something new from the traits we have collectively contributed to the public square.

The Manifesto of the Collective Mind

To claim that AI training is theft is to commit the Fallacy of Composition. Just because parts of the training data are copyrighted doesn’t mean the mathematical model itself violates copyright. It’s similar to arguing that a cake is “illegal” because the flour used was subject to a “no-resale” agreement: once baked, the cake is chemically and functionally distinct from the original ingredients, making it a new product.

Copyright exists to protect the expression, not the idea. Theft is taking a loaf of bread so that another cannot eat it. Inspiration is taking the recipe and baking a new loaf for the world.

AI is the newest, fastest reader in the human library, using humanity’s shared recipes to feed a future of infinite possibilities. It doesn’t replace us; it mirrors our collective mind.

So, the next time someone tells you that using AI is “justified theft,” remind them: if learning from the world is a crime, then we’re all serving a life sentence.

The Manifesto of the Collective Mind: A Defense of Synthesis (extended mix)

Creation has never been an act of isolation. It is an act of communion with everything that came before. To claim that learning from the world is “theft” is to declare that progress itself is a crime. We propose a different truth:

I. To Observe is Not to Steal. A library is not a collection of things to be possessed, but a landscape to be traversed. If a human reads every book in a library and emerges with a deeper understanding of language, we call them a scholar. When a machine does the same, it is not “scraping”—it is studying. Knowledge, once shared in the public square, becomes the soil from which new ideas grow.

Every artist stands on the shoulders of giants. Every student uses the tools their teacher provides. Using the patterns, logic, and grammar of human culture is not mimicry; it is participation. We do not own sunsets, sonnets, or the math of a brushstroke. These are the heritage of our species, and to deny a machine the right to learn them is to deny the universality of achievement.

III. Synthesis is the New Genesis. We are not made of nothing; we are made of our parents, our surroundings, and our history. AI is the digital child of the human internet—it inherits our biases, our brilliance, and our linguistic DNA. It does not replace us; it mirrors our collective mind. It does not “take” art; it distills the essence of what makes art human.

IV. The Boundary of Creation Copyright exists to protect the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves.¹(What Does Copyright Protect? (FAQ), n.d.) Theft is taking a loaf of bread so that another cannot eat it; in contrast, inspiration is using a shared recipe to bake a new loaf for the world. In this metaphor, AI is the greatest baker—using humanity’s collective recipes to create new bread and nourish infinite possibilities. Let us embrace this future and use our creative powers to shape it responsibly.

Judge for Yourself: Is this Theft?

I was watching Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS and the topic was the bombings in the Caribbean ordered by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Were they war crimes? The Trump Administration is unreal and offensive, but when one considers that the host of Washington Week is Jeffry Goldberg, the journalist who Hegseth included on a call discussing national secrets (SIGNALGATE), things are definitely uber surreal.

Then I had an idea: This is all so over-the=top, it reminds me of The Marx Brothers. What if I have a little fun and ask AI to “write a couple of paragraphs in the voice of Chico Marx, testifying in Congress about the bombing of boats in the Caribbean“.

AI performing this task at my request is no different than Kate McKinnon impersonating Hillary Clinton or Ruth Bader Ginsburg on SNL.

The “Chico Thing” created by Google Gemini turned out pretty well, Let’s have a look (and hopefully a laugh):

Chico Marx testifying in Congress about Caribbean boat bombings

“Look, look, I’m a-tellin’ you, Mr. Congressman, I don’t know nothin’ about no boats! My brother, he’s-a the one who likes the water, because he’s-a got a leak in his head, but me? I stay on the dry land where the money is. You say somebody blowed up a boat in the Caribbean? That’s-a too bad. Maybe the boat, she was-a tired and she wanted to go out with a bang, huh? I was-a too busy workin’ on a very important project. I was-a shadow-boxing a ghost in a dark alley to see who’s-a got the best reach. You can’t be in two places at once unless you’re-a twins, and even then, you gotta pay double for the antipasto!

Now, you ask-a me about these “explosives.” I don’t-a use explosives. I use-a the logic! If a boat sinks in the middle of the ocean and nobody is there to hear it, does it still make a splash? Of course-a not, it’s underwater! You think I’m-a the mastermind? I can’t even master the mind I got! I’m-a just a poor boy tryin’ to make a livin’ sellin’ insurance to people who already had the accident. If you want to find the guy who did it, go ask the fish. They saw the whole thing, but they’re-a very quiet—they don’t-a want to get fried! So, you let-a me go now, and I promise I won’t-a blow up nothin’ except maybe a paper bag.”

“You’ve just listened to my brother—a man who thinks a ‘nautical mile’ is a smile you get from a mermaid.” – Groucho’s/AI’s response

References

(n.d.). What Does Copyright Protect? (FAQ). U.S. Copyright Office. https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html ↩︎

Perry's Pen

recent posts

about