Ownership is a sometimes-useful, imaginary concept. When it is used well, it's a practical way to describe and reason together about particular social situations, but, when not seen for what it is, the self-consciously imaginary becomes unselfconscious, collective hallucination. Copyright, in particular, has been so warped by forever-extension, that it might as well be land. And land might as well be soulbound. Even pop culture fans refer to their favorite stories as "brands" and "franchises." We've become habituated to the idea that everything, whether in the form of ideas or spaces, is owned by someone.

And so I guess it was predictable when the sudden and difficult question of how to incorporate generative AI into our lives arose, so many of us looked for what was owned. Without getting into it deeply: the applications built from transformers at large scale are amazing. I get that immediately relegating feats like blowing past the Turing Test (yes, I know the caveats) to the realm of the normal is maybe human nature these days. Maybe it's uncool not to respond with the "all it's doing is x" response of what looks like a learned and sophisticated insider. (Most such observations treat as fact what is mere, and to me doubtful, hypothesis.) But I won't succumb to the temptation to cultivate an air of sophistication in this way. No, we have a technology that already does seemingly magical things, things I'd have assumed would not be possible for the rest of my career or even life. And we don't yet know what returns to increased scale are possible or what new behaviors architectural changes may unlock, but we do know that the human brain does whatever it does on about 20 watts.

In the teeth of existential threats to some human occupations — no one, not even highly paid consultants, tech pundits, or valley tycoons, knows the extent of these threats on a medium or longer timescale — it has been a poorly-fitting appeal to ownership of training data, not human values or social welfare that has predominated the defense of human work. But the use of publicly available but copyrighted materials as training data ought obviously to be deemed fair use. Here's what would obviously be true of a small model that did not do the amazing things that are now scaring people: It's not any more of an infringement to feed some text into such a model than to feed it into your own brain. The best defense I've seen of the copyright infringement argument against training large models with publicly availble content is that what would be a fair use can cease to be one when the use occurs at a scale and in a social context that harms the copyrght holder, or at least in a way that soemhow seems unfair. But this all-things-considered balancing only points to the limits of the copyright-and-fair-use conceptual apparatus for discussing how these machines ought to be used. It is discourse within the ownership hallucination.

Our reflex to grasp at ownership of culture in order to eke out a place among the machines is a sign of an atrophied capacity for collective thought. We don't fight for the alleviation or avoidance of human suffering by stunting the development of machines through legal artifice. For one, it's not even possible to do so in the long run given that our law won't control every actor everywhere. The tech here isn't like building a nuclear weapon, and it will not take nation-state level resources to build and deploy it. But more importantly, it misdirects the conversation from collective, human values. And that's what worries me. We have in recent decades arrived at a law so overtaken with the rhetoric and conceptual tools tuned to the instincts and material desires of owners and bosses (but justified in the naturalizing rhetoric of equality and automony) that our response to an astounding technological advance, one as scary as it is magical, is to fight by pointing out what we "own." We're so accustomed to these misbegotten legal habits that even those who suffer from over-ownership decry the immorality of using "their" publicly availble texts to train a model. Immorality!

I'm fine using the word "ownership," understand its utility, even believe in its essential purposes in our law and society. But what do we really own. Nothing. All we have is ourselves, others, and the distinctive human experience of self and other together. If we do use the word, it should be in service of our collective conversation.