AI: investment, copyright, human in the loop
Reading: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI, Cory Doctorow, 5 December 2025.
Three things jumped out at me from Cory Doctorow's interesting, important, and entertaining talk:
1. The investment thesis driving AI
Three things jumped out at me from Cory Doctorow's interesting, important, and entertaining talk:
1. The investment thesis driving AI
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
That's it.
That's the $13T growth story that Morgan Stanley is telling.
2. The copyright issue
the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. [...]The US Copyright Offices position means that the only way these companies can get a copyright is to pay humans to do creative work.
3. "Automation blindness is the Achilles' heel of 'humans in the loop'"
The human in the loop safety net—adding quality control to automated decisions—isn't going to work at scale. The argument is that staff will become blind to any mistakes but will still be the ones that get blamed.
Well worth reading the whole essay.