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In the ongoing generative AI crisis, people are talking about copyright as a solution, as it's the only pre-existing legal lever that seems like it might be applicable.

But copyright was a bad tool used for multiple unrelated purposes already before, and it's an even worse tool for this. People go there because of the theft analogy and the "intellectual property" metaphor. Don't even get me started on patents.

What the generative AI crisis is really about, and which already happened before AI, with the slow paper and brains AI of corporations, is the commoditization of culture and how soulless mass production depletes and pollutes the soil it grows from.

Copyright isn't the solution, because arguably copyright is part of the problem, as we see when corporations build on folklore and then fence it in to prevent others from doing the same thing. This is core to the commoditization of culture and enables it.