On a blog I hang out on, we’ve been discussing what the chatbots are really for – they’re getting a lot of interest, and venture capital… but so did crypto, which is now in the process of melting down. Charlie Stross thinks it’s the dead cat on the table, to distract from the crypto collapse.
The question, though, is why anyone would want to have a bot copyright or patent something, rather than have that for themselves. I don’t think anyone has asked this, and I think I’ve got the answer.
The 1% don’t actually have a swimming pool of money, like Scrooge McDuck. They control money. That’s what people like The Former Guy (TFG) do – they take out loans on their holdings, and so get tax breaks on the loans.
This is the next step: an “AI”* incorporates – an artificial person incorporating as an artificial person, sets up all income to go into a trust, to “keep the system running that the bot runs on.” The actual owner is written in as the controller of the trust (and so, it’s not income to them), and then they go their merry way, borrowing, spending, and claiming losses.
The real masters are the 1%, and the 0.1%, who control the trusts. Taxes, of course, are only for the rabble like us.
* AI – I put that in quotes. Speaking as someone with a long career as a compute professional, let me say there is no such thing as artificial intelligence. They’re all varieties of what are called expert systems. ACOUP has a long discussion on it, as well: https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/