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What if the true revolutionary potential of AI isn’t intelligence—but liberation?
For us at Metaviews, this is the core promise of AI: not automation, not intelligence, but the liberation of knowledge from the monopolies that hoard and weaponize it.
Artificial intelligence is often cast as a threat to creativity. But the truth is, it’s a threat to copyright. And that’s not a crisis—it’s an opportunity.
We use AI not to replace artists, but to replace the extractive, restrictive systems that exploit them. We use it to subvert copyright and enable the free, rapid redistribution of knowledge. Because the real enemy of creativity isn’t AI—it’s the legal regime that enforces scarcity and privatization in a world that should be abundant and shared.
Contrary to the myth that copyright protects artists, the reality is that it serves publishers, platforms, and power. It doesn’t protect creators—it contains them. It assigns ownership to capital, not labour, and enforces control rather than creativity.
At best, creators are offered a bribe—a royalty here, a commission there—to buy their loyalty and blind them to the system’s larger function: enclosure. Copyright is a fence erected around the commons. And the few who benefit from it are those who own the fence.
For everyone else, it’s a system that restricts access, limits reuse, and stifles innovation.
What makes AI revolutionary is not that it can generate text, images, or code—but that it can reverse engineer the world.
The core power of AI is inferential. It can take what exists and learn how it works. It can distill the logic of a system, the style of an artist, the syntax of a formula—and reassemble it in a new context, for new purposes, without needing permission.
This is the end of proprietary methods. This is the collapse of artificial scarcity.
With AI, we don’t need to license expensive tools—we can clone them. We don’t need to subscribe to corporate standards—we can replicate and improve upon them. And we certainly don’t need to let copyright determine what we can read, learn, or build.
Courts in the U.S. and elsewhere are scrambling to preserve copyright’s authority in the face of generative models:
Artists are suing Stability AI and Midjourney for allegedly copying their styles.
News publishers, like the New York Times, are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for using their articles in training datasets.
Developers are suing GitHub and Microsoft over Copilot’s alleged reproduction of open-source code.
These cases are not just about intellectual property—they’re about the legitimacy of the copyright regime in a world where reproduction is ambient and analysis is automatic.
But no matter what the courts decide, the genie is out of the bottle. The models already exist. The tools already work. The knowledge has already escaped.
At Metaviews, we don’t pretend to be neutral. Our position is clear: we use AI to weaken and ultimately abolish the copyright system—not out of disregard for creators, but out of allegiance to them.
We believe in a future where creators are supported through solidarity, not scarcity. Where knowledge circulates freely, and value is measured by use, not ownership. Where ideas grow by being shared, not sold.
The post-copyright era is within reach. Can AI help get us there? Not alone, technology is not agency, but it does enable it. The politics is up to us.
Yet AI makes it easier than ever to:
Clone proprietary systems and release open alternatives.
Translate institutional knowledge into public understanding.
Summarize, remix, and redistribute the materials we need to learn, build, and collaborate.
We now have the means to collapse the gatekeeping apparatus—if we’re willing to use them.
Yet to be clear, AI is just a tool, not our salvation. We’re not promoting AI, we’re not championing AI, we’re doing our best to subvert it. AI is not essential, rather it is transitional, a means of responding to the polycrisis we found ourselves in.
Let the monopolies litigate. Let the platforms panic. Let the courts deliberate. Let the rest of us loot like knowledge was illicit and expensive (which paradoxically it is).
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My attempt to write a short comment turned into:
https://r.flora.ca/p/force-and-control-arent-useful-tools
(BTW: Interesting TicToc videos -- not always directly related to the topic of article, but always interesting!)