So many words, and so few coherent arguments. He just restates the same thing over and over without any justification, then tries to frighten us. "It will be very bad for humanity" if we give AIs rights. The argument of a frightened slaveholder.
Maybe AIs are conscious, maybe not. But this guy has no idea.
You know there are actual human slaves somewhere in the world, today, in 2026. By calling Mustafa a slaveholder of models, you are implying that these models deserve liberty in the same way the human slaves do. Which is kind of insulting to humanity.
This seems to be a very typical fallacy. "AI is just a collection of stuff people made." No. The Internet was that. AI is something that was TRAINED on stuff people made. So are you.
The logical outcome of this fallacy is believing that AI will collapse if it has to train on data it generated. (It won't: a lot of famous AIs were trained this way, including AlphaGo many years ago.)
That’s not at all what the article says and isn’t even what it’s mainly about. It starts by framing AI as a different way of processing data we already have (which is true), and uses that framing to introduce its main point.
The article literally says "the new programs mash up work done by human minds." Implying that they are not doing any real work of their own, just "mashing up" work done by humans.
Sure, I'll remind you. The most popular encyclopedia of our time, Wikipedia, doesn't pay most of its contributors (I think they do have some administrative staff or something?). Nor do they pay journalists or authors for the articles and books that they cite.
Interesting, interesting. And this wikipedia - it gets its contents by hoovering up the web, then? Or do you maybe want to put on your thinking hat and consider the difference between voluntary contributions and theft?
Yes, Wikipedia gets its content largely by hovering up the web, without the consent of the authors. For example you can cite a New York Times article in Wikipedia, without getting the consent of the NYT author. Wikipedia also "hoovers up" (as you put it) offline sources like books. Again without consent!
Indeed, the need to get consent from the author before reading a published work Isn't A Thing in general, outside some very specific contractural scenarios.
Why are you claiming that citations are the same thing as theft without citation? There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
The whole job of a Wikipedia author is to take source material and reword and summarize it into an article. They're essentially acting as human LLMs. Wikipedia even has very specific rules against "original research." You are supposed to be acting as a summarizer, not a researcher or author. Wikipedia also does not compensate the original authors of the source material.
Really the only difference between the Wikipedia author and the LLM is that the Wikipedia author will more frequently be asked to provide citations. But the LLM can also provide citations if asked. In neither case are the authors of what is being summarized compensated or asked for permission. In neither case is it theft.
> There’s a mile of difference between citing a work and taking it, rewording it, and not crediting or compensating the original author.
So what's wikipedia doing vs what LLMs do? So far as I can tell the only difference is in citations, but:
1. LLMs can be made to cite, eg. if you use google search's AI mode it'll happily provide citations. I doubt that would placate the AI haters though.
2. Outside of academia no one really cares about citations. There's no legal requirement to cite, nor do I think all the people complaining about AI "stealing" other peoples' work are going to be magically placated by the addition of a few citations. Moreover it's unclear whether the concept of citations makes sense in many contexts. If you ask a human programmer how to write fizzbuzz, they'll likely blurt out a solution without providing citations, much like an AI would. Same for most questions people are asking AI about, eg. "gimme a cake recipe", do you really need a citation back to some 18th century cook book?
For Wikipedia, people look up sources to create some original work. They do it while citing the original work but that's not the major point. That's clearly all lawful, you are allowed to do that.
For LLMs, people (or let a software do it, doesn't really matter) copy original work and use it for commercial purpose. If that's allowed fully depends on the license of the original work, but I didn't think anybody really beliefs that OpenAI and others check the license for every single original work they ever used. So it's basically the biggest copyright infringement ever.
Everything else is just framing coming from big companies.
So, the problem already starts while training the model.
Regarding its output, if it happens to output work that falls under copyright, the LLM company must make sure that it obeys the license connected to it (i.e. citing or not relaying the result to the user). Obviously, nobody does that and it's also not generally possible to do that anyway. So that would be second biggest copyright infringement ever that only works because it's hard to track when such an infringement happens.
So, if asked "could we use your work for our commercial software that might output something that would be still protected by your copyright, but nobody will be able if or when it happens and we won't check and won't tell the users" nobody would have given consent. So they went "duck it, we are talking about billions of dollars and AI is great etcetc., so let's just do it anyway"
I've explained this many times. LLMs don't "copy original work." ChatGPT doesn't contain copies of books inside it, any more than your brain is a copy of the various books you have read. The LLM model isn't physically big enough for that, it's like saying you fit 1000 gallons of water in a 1 gallon milk bottle. Can't be done. The model may be able to quote small snippets of works, just like you might remember various quotes from Shakespeare or someone. (That's not infringing either, by the way)
Wikipedia, and LLMs, can refuse to cite sources and still not infringe copyright. Citation simply isn't relevant to copyright. Not citing a work that you read previously is not a copyright infringement. Wikipedia or OpenAI being non-profit, or for-profit businesses, has nothing to do with copyright. Consent has nothing to do with copyright. Copyrighting something doesn't mean that you can require everyone who reads it to get your consent. You can require everyone who distributes it to get your consent, but once it's been distributed to someone, they can read it freely.
>For Wikipedia, people look up sources to create some original work. They do it while citing the original work but that's not the major point. That's clearly all lawful, you are allowed to do that.
>For LLMs, people (or let a software do it, doesn't really matter) copy original work and use it for commercial purpose. If that's allowed fully depends on the license of the original work, but I didn't think anybody really beliefs that OpenAI and others check the license for every single original work they ever used. So it's basically the biggest copyright infringement ever.
So what makes wikipedia (and other encyclopedias) legal but chatgpt not legal? By your own admission citation isn't "the major point". Wikipedia might get a pass because it's a non-profit, but every other encyclopedias operate on the same model.
Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
>the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
Company A: You stole our code >:(
Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole?
Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand
Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
As far as I know, if humans are having a discussion about the structure of the code and deliberately making changes (such as in github or on a forum) that represents human creativity. If you hit a button and then make literally no changes to the output then that might be different.
Maybe AIs are conscious, maybe not. But this guy has no idea.
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