Rent-seeking doesn’t mean “produces something and charges recurring fee for its use.” It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing th

Rent-seeking doesn’t mean “produces something and charges recurring fee for its use.” It actually refers to what you’re implicitly defending here: capturing the value of people’s production. Training AI on other people’s labor without paying them for it and then extracting value from it is rent-seeking. Consider what happens to AI companies’ value if they had to enter into mutual agreements with their data sources. AI company value will be almost solely determined by the AI company’s own value contribution, which is close to zero, while the data sources’ value would be unaffected or go up. If your business model relies on you leveraging the work of others without mutually agreeable remuneration, chances are good you’re the rent-seeker.