Jack Dorsey Thinks IP Law Should Be Deleted
Are you okay with that?
(Enjoy this essay read by your fearless writer-instead of AI!)
Hello, Friend,
Something is shifting in the messaging of the Tech Bros, and it’s been fascinating and disturbing to witness. For many years, they presented themselves as virtual do-gooders, helping us connect with each other and create virtual communities online. They ‘policed’ their ‘free’ platforms and (sometimes) removed trolls, bullies, copycats, and offensive comments and content, but not always. Sure, they were making money, but they were building international town squares designed to change the future of humanity for the better! At least that’s what they told us. We embraced their platforms, because they made us feel connected, united, informed. We signed their convoluted Terms of Service agreements without careful reading. We were the customers, after all, and they’d have our best interests at heart. Right?
Then the platforms started to change. We saw less of each other and more ‘sponsored posts.’ Friends and family started disappearing from our feeds. We’d think about them on occasion and wonder where they went, but we were busy watching cute cat videos and ranting about our increasingly divided political views.
The TOS you sign when you join social media platforms allow them to use anything you publicly upload, post, like, view, share, follow, or comment for whatever purposes they choose. They can repost it, sell it without compensating you, create derivative works…whatever they want to do with it you have licensed them to do by joining their platform.
Most people didn’t understand that we were never the customer. We’re the product. Our data is the commodity they’re mining from us. Our posts, our videos, our photos, our creativity, our connections, our preferences and predilections, all of it has been gathered into virtual profiles and sold to anyone willing to pay the price.
Since the election, the Tech Bros have become emboldened to say the quiet things out loud. The thin veneer of ‘virtual community’ has worn away to reveal the darker nature of their goals. Social media was never about being social, the social part was the bait, the algorithms were the hook, and they’ve managed to reel in billions of people and hold them captive to data mine, micro-target, and manipulate.
There’s a new wrinkle emerging in the fabric of social media. Those Terms of Service you signed have taken on a different and more significant meaning. For creatives, really for everyone, this wrinkle has serious implications. Anything people have publicly shared on their pages and in the feeds is being used to train AI. If you’re a writer, an artist, a performer, a musician, a video producer, any and all of the content that you have ever publicly posted on social media platforms is being fed to AI. You may have used social media to reach or build an audience and promote and sell your art. You may have been compensated for content views, but what you were really doing was giving the rights to your creative content away to the Tech Bros. You are the product, not the customer. Even if you paid them an advertising fee, you agreed to the TOS. Yes, you hold the rights to your work, but they also have the right to use it as they choose. Therein lies the rub.
Social Media feeds are filling up with derivative, disturbing, divisive, and often disgusting AI Slop. Meta has begun shifting focus to fake AI profiles that ‘create’ AI content and leave AI comments. The first roll out met considerable backlash, but they’re not giving up on this idea. They’ve calculated what is sticky, and are using AI to generate content that will attract the most engagement without having to pay creatives. There will be more and more of this as time progresses. If you’re an artist and you continue to post on these platforms, you’re agreeing to feed your art to AI, and in doing so, you’ve relinquished exclusive rights to that content. Elon just merged X with AIx, specifically to use X content to train his AI. Meta is training their AI with public user content from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
That’s not the whole of it, though, because AI companies owned by social media Tech Bros are using any and all creative content to train their AI without permission or compensation to the original creators. Most of my books are being used to train META AI. If you’re an author, you can search for your books here. I did not agree to this. I never posted the content of those books on their platforms. I’m no longer a user of their platforms. I suppose I could attempt to sue them, but I lack the resources to pursue that avenue. There are lawsuits from creatives in process, but it’s hard to put this particular Genie back into this particular bottle.
Jack Dorsey thinks IP Law should be deleted. Elon agrees. Jack claims that gatekeepers aren’t compensating creatives fairly, which is true, but his real motivation is less clear. Mark Zuckerberg thinks artists and content creators overestimate the value of their content and should allow it to be used to train AI for free. Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleman believes anything ever published on the open web should be considered ‘freeware.’ What Mustafa (and Mark and Elon and Jack and Jeff and Bill and Larry and Sam and the rest of the Tech Bros) want is the freedom to use IP from creatives to train their AI to replace them. They want to be freed from the legal ramifications of their theft, because they believe that your art should be free for the taking. If AI slop is any indication of what they plan to do with our creativity, they’re delusional at best and diabolical at worst.
I’m Team Diabolical, having explored their NRx Dark Enlightenment fantasies.
It’s long past time to stop feeding these monsters and their insatiable algorithms. They have zero concern for your well being, the future of this planet, or their fellow humans. The ravenous resources needed to power AI will result in environmental devastation. They do not care. They’re working towards CEO fiefdom dystopian surveillance states and surrounding themselves and the rest of us with AI generated humanoid robots. They plan to ‘evolve’ with their new robot buddies and leave the ‘inferior’ human race behind to live forever.
If everyone were to stop using social media today, the Tech Bros would no longer be able to afford to finance their shitty dreams. We have the power to stop them. We may not be the customer, but we are the consumer. Their platforms cannot survive without our attention. If we do nothing they will squeeze out every last drop of our humanity and replace us with humanoid robots. You can leave social media. I’ve done it and I survived. Yes, it’s hard, but the future they have planned for us will be far more difficult.
I, for one, intend to continue to fight for a brighter future. How about you?
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