The Enclosure of the Intelligence Commons

In England between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, common lands that had been used by entire communities for grazing, gathering, and subsistence were progressively enclosed — fenced off, privatized, converted from shared resource to individual property. Enclosure increased agricultural productivity. It also displaced millions of people who had depended on the commons for survival, concentrating wealth in the hands of landowners. The training of AI models on copyrighted works without compensation is a form of enclosure. The commons being enclosed is not physical land but the accumulated textual heritage of human civilization — the corpus of writing that represents millennia of intellectual labor, creative effort, and cultural investment. The models extract enormous value from this corpus. The value accrues primarily to the companies that build and deploy the models. The creators whose works constitute the corpus receive nothing.