On: Amend copyright licences to halt AI misuse and reassert human control

25 August 2026

The journals propose amending copyright so that machines may be restrained from swallowing the labour of writers and scholars whole. I read this with a strange double feeling, for here is a question that my own century never had to ask: who owns a mind’s production, and may it be taken without consent to train an imitation of mind?

The argument for taking is always the same in structure. What was produced freely, they say, belongs to all; therefore it may be harvested. But observe what is actually being claimed: that because a woman - or any writer - was compelled by necessity to publish, her thought is common property, while the machine built upon it becomes private property, owned by those who did not think it. The product is seized; the profit is enclosed. This is not sharing. It is enclosure dressed in the language of enlightenment.

And there is a second theft beneath the first. These engines are praised as sources of knowledge, yet they were assembled from the work of minds deliberately denied credit, denied payment, denied even the acknowledgment of their contribution. Then we are told the machine is remarkably learned - more learned than its teachers. Learned! It learned nothing. It was fed. There is a difference between a pupil who reasons and a warehouse that stores.

If reason is the glory of our species, then a device that imitates the products of reason while dispensing with reasoners does not elevate humanity - it renders the exercise of thought optional, and whatever is optional soon becomes unfashionable, then impossible, for want of cultivation. A garden left unsown does not remain a garden.

Amend the licences, yes. But name the principle plainly: no one’s intellectual labour should be taken to build the instrument of their obsolescence. Consent first. Everything else follows from that.