i was downvoted recently because i said the ai issue is not about copyright, but labour. a lot of people parrot what seem nintendo talking points just because of ai but the issue is not that they used content without attribution, but about the expropriation of labour this is connected with. deepseek also infringed copyrights to trade their models, but theirs is open source, so that labour theft becomes released to the masses. on the other side, western companies infringe copyrights and lock their software.

They also knew that, ultimately, destroying the economic foundation for humans making content while also making it easy to generate slop by the bucketful, would wreck the internet—and, thus, their own content supply chain. Hecht warned that AI had started a “doom loop” that would “threaten the economic foundations of its essential suppliers” and eventually make the internet infinitely worse (a process for which the media critic Cory Doctorow has created the term “enshittification,” and that you may recognize from searching for… pretty much anything on the internet).

This is not at all what enshittification means. Doctorow used enshittification to describe the mechanisms by which tech platforms establish monopoly and then extract value from that monopoly until they die. This was already before modern LLMs rolled around

But I will say enshittification would be a fantastic word to describe the process above so I can see why the author got it wrong

Yeah but we really didn’t need a new word for “makes bad”.

Nah. The enclosure of the commons and the proletarianization of the masses was bigger, but you're working on a solid second place.