Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Marx, you described alienation as the process by which the worker is dispossessed of the product of his labour, which turns back against him as an alien and hostile force. AI, fed by millions of human texts whose substance it appropriates, reproduces and sells, is it the ultimate form of that alienation, this time applied no longer to manual labour but to the labour of the mind?
Capital feeds on living labour like a vampire. I wrote that. It was not a literary metaphor; it was an anatomical description. The vampire asks no permission. It takes what it needs, transforms it, and sells it back to the very people it has drained.
AI is exactly that, applied to thought. Millions of human beings have written, argued, taught, suffered, imagined. That collective intellectual labour, accumulated over decades, has been captured, distilled and monetised by a few firms that now control access to it and set its price. You produced the raw material. They own the factory. You hold no share in the value produced. It is the fundamental contradiction of capitalism: exact reproduction, different scale.
What interests me even more than the diagnosis is the mystification. You are presented with this as a service, as shared progress, as the democratisation of knowledge. That is exactly what the industrial bourgeoisie said about its manufactories. The ideology of an age is always the ideology of the ruling class. Today that ideology is called “free access” and “augmented intelligence”.
To whom does what you have said to the machine belong? Ask that question. Then look at who refuses to answer it. You will have found the owner.