In this edition of Our Culture Dennis Broe explores the world of AI which is often presented as neutral, but is in fact being shaped by corporate power and class interests. For the working-class this raises urgent questions about ownership, access, and stealing. This article argues for reclaiming AI as a shared cultural commons rather than allowing it to become 21stcentury version of enclosure.
Is AI “intelligence” or plagiarism software? By plagiarism I don’t mean the use of AI that plagues teachers, that is, AI used by students to produce papers whose writing and subject matter they are largely unaware of, but the larger question of whether AI itself is simply a massive plagiarism device, stealing the knowledge of the world. In other words, plagiarism on a grand scale. The street crime of student plagiarism may be only a lower-level enactment of the suite crime of massive plagiarism that is AI.
AI and IP
We all know about the miracle of AI, supposedly the software that will revolutionise existence, make all our lives easier, and point the way to a brave new world. It is very important to understand that much of this is hype, selling and boosting shares in a multi-billion-dollar industry that is the last best hope of Western capitalism, dictated by US tech lords in Silicon Valley for the purpose of dominating the digital economy and extracting profit from it. It is also important to lock up, obscure, and keep behind closed doors the secrets of this industry so that the IP (intellectual property), in this case the source code, is kept private and can generate endless profit.
Intellectual property is a key concept in the digital age and can be viewed in three ways. From the point of view of the individual creator, IP is their work (film, play, song, book, etc.) that they have produced. From the point of view of the company, IP is an already established work, such as a film, television series, book, or music library, that can be used to create or “exploit” IP, with the goal being to lock up as much intellectual property as possible. The third view is IP as part of a general and shared intellectual realm, open to all, since this is the way ideas work and travel.
What we are finding out, of course, is that AI can be a useful tool but cannot supplant human understanding and knowledge. The first thing to understand about the hype is the name itself. “Artificial intelligence” conceals the reality of what it is, with “artificial” sweetening the fact that it is derived from a machine, and “intelligence” suggesting that it can duplicate the reasoning of the human mind, which it cannot. The economist Michael Hudson has suggested that a better, less hyped name would be synthetic, or non-human, correlation analysis, since that is what it actually does: putting together massive amounts of data, sometimes in erroneous ways. This has given rise to the term “hallucinating”, where what AI returns makes no sense in relation to what has been asked.
That more accurate description, synthetic correlation analysis, would not produce the billions of dollars of speculation now being poured into an industry that has yet to generate a single dollar in profits for any of the six major companies developing it. This is why there is so much talk of the “AI bubble”, since there is no widespread acceptance of AI as anything more than a market phenomenon. The question for most analysts is not whether this is a bubble, but when it bursts and what the impact will be, ranging from the milder dot-com crash of 2000 to the 2008 crash, which nearly brought the system down.
If AI speculation in these six major companies were removed from the American economy, that economy would be at zero growth, that is, in recession. This is a sign of how important this speculative bubble is, and how disastrous its collapse will be. Nvidia, the company that makes the microchips necessary to power AI, has seen its market value soar to unprecedented heights one day, only to come crashing down the next as investors grow nervous about the hype. It has also been accused of pumping up its own stock, not only through the now-standard financial scam of buybacks, where the company buys its own stock to boost valuation, but also by investing in companies that buy Nvidia’s chips, thereby inflating both their stock prices and its own.
The locking up of source code, the IP, behind the doors of powerful companies such as Apple, Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Tesla, and Oracle, is countered by the Chinese model of sharing source code through its AI, DeepSeek. This was developed for less than five percent of what US tech companies are spending and respects the idea that this form of human interaction should be a global commons shared by all.
Open source, that is, the abandonment of IP in the digital era, was the dream of many internet pioneers. This dream was cancelled in favour of privatising the commons and locking up source code to increase stock value for investors and shareholders with no interest in a global commons, only in global domination.
There were two competing views of the internet at its birth. The first, developed by the Pentagon, saw it as a proprietary tool for war and intelligence. The second, held by early internet pioneers, imagined an open and free network built by all to expand global knowledge. These competing models remain central to the development of AI today.
The Chinese model, DeepSeek, by contrast, is developed within a Global South socialist economy and represents an open alternative to expensive American models. One way costs are reduced is by using open-source code and avoiding the legal expenses of locking it down as IP. Last year, Chinese open-source AI models surged past the American Big Six, accounting for 17 percent of all AI downloads.
This says nothing yet about how AI will be used. It is being sold as a cost-cutting device, which in practice means cutting jobs. It has already penetrated areas of middle-class employment, including legal work, accounting, and office administration. The promise is that 30 percent of US jobs could be replaced, and 60 percent significantly altered. There is little debate about this. In India, entry-level IT jobs have been reduced by up to 25 percent due to AI. The industry’s response is denial, claiming that as many new jobs will be created as are lost. This mirrors the tobacco industry in the 1970s denying the cancerous effects of smoking.
AI Used to Enhance The Life of Seniors in China, Source: Global Times
In China, AI development is more carefully controlled so that it does not simply become a mechanism for mass layoffs and instead benefits those in need, such as senior citizens. The problem, then, is not the technology itself, but the system under which, and the purpose for which, it is developed. In the West, AI is primarily a profit-making technology aimed at reducing labour costs, even though it is marketed as enhancing medicine and public services. In China, AI is being developed to enhance the lives of workers across society.
How to Train Your AI Dragon
We now come to the second crucial aspect of AI and IP: how AI is constructed. It cannot reason. What it can do is absorb massive amounts of data and correlate that data, sometimes meaningfully, sometimes not. This has led to its characterisation as “plagiarism software”, since it is trained on vast quantities of material drawn from countless sources, often without permission. In many cases, companies simply steal this source material and then profit from it.
The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI, partnered with Microsoft, for allegedly using millions of Times articles without payment to train its systems, including Microsoft Copilot. This large-scale theft is rarely acknowledged by AI companies.
There are similarly troubling uses in the entertainment industry. Actress Scarlett Johansson criticised OpenAI for using an approximation of her voice, developed through her performance in the film Her, to create its female voice “Sky”, a competitor to Siri and Alexa. OpenAI had asked to use her voice, she refused, and the company proceeded anyway with an AI imitation. Johansson argued that her voice, cultivated over years of acting, is her intellectual property. The company was forced to withdraw the voice.
Johansson, famous for her role as the Black Widow in the Marvel universe, was asked whether OpenAI president Sam Altman would make a good Marvel villain. Referring to his survival of an internal revolt by OpenAI workers and his subsequent push towards greater privatisation, she replied, “I guess, maybe with a robotic arm.”
Unsurprisingly, the most recent actors’ strike centred on protecting performers from having their voices, faces, and mannerisms stolen by AI. Writers uncovered an even more insidious plan during their own strike: studios proposed having AI generate first drafts of scripts, hiring writers only to edit them afterwards. The resulting IP would belong entirely to the studio. Writers successfully blocked this for now, but it is likely to resurface in future contract negotiations.
Similar dynamics are playing out in the music industry. In 2025, the top country music song for two weeks, Walk My Walk, was generated by AI, signalling record companies’ desire to eliminate human labour while retaining IP profits. These are battles entertainment unions must confront.
Deskilling is also accelerating. Music producer Timbaland, who released an AI-generated track (Glitch X Pulse) by an AI artist (TaTa Tatumi), has remarked that basic skills have diminished as digital music has evolved. “You don’t have to know how to play chords. You’ve got a chord machine. You don’t need to make drum loops because you can just drag and drop.” With AI, this deskilling advances to the point where “musicians” no longer need to know how to play music at all.
The AI battlefield is constantly shifting, and as Shoshana Zuboff notes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this is deliberate. Tech companies aim to “innovate” so rapidly that governments and unions cannot regulate or negotiate fast enough.
Europe has led on AI regulation and the protection of artists’ IP, but the Trump administration has attempted to undermine these efforts during tariff negotiations with the EU, arguing that regulation harms American corporate profits.
The goal of Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors in this fusion of finance and technology is to create a new Wild West, where rules, regulations, and unions are sidelined as digital gunfighters battle it out. The innocent bystanders, the rest of us, are left caught in the crossfire.
The alternative is what Karl Marx described in the Grundrisse as the “general intellect”: a shared intellectual commons, developed by all and open to all. In contemporary terms, this might be summed up as “minds of the world, unite”. The challenge is to reclaim our collective stake not in owning knowledge, but in freely sharing it, for the benefit of the many rather than the profit of the few.
AM: Does AI create new barriers to working-class cultural expression and participation, and how does it extract and replace value from working-class creativity?
The question of the valence of AI for working-class expression and creativity in Europe, and in Britain in particular, centres first on the issue of digital sovereignty. The goal of U.S. tech producers is to lock up AI behind Silicon Valley digital doorways and to have the rest of the world dependent for access on the modes of access available through the American Big Six companies. Thus, it is imperative first that Europe and the UK develop their own digital pathways, or that they take advantage of the Chinese open-source AI through DeepSeek and other companies.
The first requirement for any kind of working-class use is freedom from the tyranny, and overpricing, of the American model, where source code is locked up and not free for all to use.
Does the enclosure of AI through IP maintain and extend existing class divisions? What should happen to IP in the digital age?
Thus, considering source code as digital IP requires that those who would open up the process demand a return to an open-source model, one that facilitates sharing the world’s knowledge rather than locking it up behind ever more expensive private gates.
We have seen this already in film and television, where, with the rise of the major streaming companies, films that used to be open to all are now locked behind paywalls and open only to subscribers, and television series that used to be available for free on networks are now also locked behind subscriber walls.
We need first to demand that AI become an open, transparent process.
That said, the next step is to demand that AI be developed in a way different from how it is being developed by the U.S. majors, that is, as first and foremost a device to induce mass unemployment by facilitating a kind of industry-wide, dizzying automation that will wholesale wipe out jobs.
This demand necessitates a coming together, in the digital age, of what are called working- and middle-class labourers, what used to be referred to as blue- and white-collar workers, in a realisation that they are seen by employers as one and that there is a mass campaign to replace as many of them from both classes as possible. Capitalists have thus dissolved, in their minds, the distinction between the two, and it is imperative that workers respond by organising across class lines and dissolving these distinctions as well.
AM: If a left-wing government were elected, what concrete policies and laws could it pass to promote cultural democracy in AI?
We might take New York as an example. They have elected, at least in name, a Socialist, or Democratic Socialist, mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, and one of his first actions was to name as a key advisor Lina Khan, the only progressive appointee in the Biden administration. As head of the Federal Trade Commission, Khan instituted lawsuits against the tech monopolies, trying to break them up. She kickstarted her career by explaining how Amazon’s competitive pricing and control of the e-commerce platform enabled it to create a monopoly in which it dominates both small businesses and consumers.
Europe has been in the forefront of calling out monopolistic practices, and any left-wing government would need to stand up to Trump and Musk’s tariff bullying and assert its right to police these practices in its own domain.
AM: How could AI be democratised so that it functions as a collective resource?
These are the prerequisites to a democratisation of AI. The Chinese model also points the way to government planning in the development of AI. A left-wing government, instead of allowing companies to continue their march to unemployment, would instead identify areas of need that AI could accommodate, such as senior care, areas that are not for profit but for the well-being of society as a whole. That government would then move AI development in these directions.
In addition, as AI continues to automate, something must be done about job loss. A few years ago, there was a debate about a guaranteed wage, with Finland launching a pilot programme with a guaranteed basic living wage. The effects of this were not only less stress on workers but also, surprising to the business press, workers who were more willing to work and to expand their training to include cultural work as well. The pilot programme was a huge success, but all talk of a guaranteed wage has now ceased, as the imperative in Europe to rearm and prepare for a false war against a phony enemy has increased.
This demand must be reinstated, giving workers the ability to explore new areas of interest instead of simply living an empty, impoverished life on the dole, the place to which capitalism wants to consign them.
AI could be a tremendous boon for humanity, but only if humanity, the 99 percent, reclaim both its function and its development from the 1 percent who are attempting to control all access to this latest branch of what Marx termed the “General Intellect”, the process by which knowledge expands and which, unimpeded by capital, could be a boon to the development of all those on the planet, in the Western world and the Global South.
Read the rest of the editions from the Our Culture series:
Culture as Class Struggle: An Interview with Jenny Farrell
Our Culture: RIP British Working-Class Cinema (1935 – 2025) by Brett Gregory
Our Culture: The Uncomfortable Truth About Public Libraries
Our Culture: Breaking through the Class ceiling with bread and roses
Our Culture: Games and Class Struggle – with Scott Alsworth
Our Culture: Prize-winning Poetry Only Please! with Andy Croft
Our Culture: Democratising the BBC
Our Culture: Prison, Class, and Art – with Nick Moss
