I read Cory Doctorow’s newsletter Pluralistic regularly and this book was essentially an expanded version of a number of his columns. But I found several points insightful.
Recently I cited Cory when I wrote about not being able to speak centaur. He unpacks his “centaur/reverse centaur” model and provides an explanation of what “AI” really is and how we’ve gotten here. This is all stuff I’m already pretty familiar with.
I think his principal argument comes up after he talks about copyright. Basically, he points out that copyright is not going to protect individual artists for several reasons. First, the benefits of copyright have been almost entirely captured by the big publishers and media companies: they can wield it to extract profits from the public, but they pass a smaller and smaller fraction back to the creative workers that created the copyrighted works. And second, because the things that AI companies are doing (when they aren’t stealing works) would not be banned by copyright — or, if they were, it would make many other ordinary activities illegal.
His key insight is that creative workers need to recognize that they are “workers” and, like other workers, need to organize to have enough power to stand up against the big media companies. As a long-time union activist this is a story that is near-and-dear to my heart. I have frequently seen people who look for rules or laws to protect them (like minimum wage, for example) rather than organizing with their co-workers to demand the power to extract concessions from employers directly. He points out that the Taft Hartley Act, that cleverly and malevolently forbid sectoral bargaining, resulted in the high water mark for labor activism in the 1940s, and has allowed the oligarchs to slowly claw back most of what they lost to labor after the gilded age. I’ve been saying the same thing for a long time.
He also talks a bit about what happens after the bubble collapses. Philip Brewer has written a thoughtful essay about that and Cory’s perspective is largely aligned in terms of the big picture. But he goes on to point out all of the cool stuff that small, open-source models can do to make us all centaurs. He cites some examples he’s using himself and points out a bunch of other possibilities that small-scale AI could offer to enable creative workers to do their creative work better.
It’s a thoughtful and insightful book that pulls together a number of Cory’s ideas into a coherent and organized form. It’s worth reading.
