AI has a communism problem
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,”
Well, such a great ideal. Unfortunately, the world is not an ideal place. The above leads to an Incentive Problem. No one works because everyone gets the same.
In the same way that traditional communism struggles because rewards are detached from individual effort, the “AI-conomy” risks a collapse of the creative incentive structure.
The “Problem of Communism” maps directly onto the “Creator Problem” in the age of AI:
1. The “Free Rider” Problem → The “Training Data” Problem
In Communism: You work hard, but the “free rider” who does nothing gets the same loaf of bread.
In AI: You spend 10 years mastering oil painting. An AI “scrapes” your work (without paying you) and allows someone else to generate a similar image in 5 seconds. The AI company and the “prompter” are essentially free-riding on your years of uncompensated labor. So, the best option for me is to wait for someone to create art, and then just prompt it.
2. Lack of Incentive → The “Why Bother?” Paradox
In Communism: If the state takes 90% of your extra harvest, you stop trying to grow extra food.
In AI: If a creator knows their unique style will be instantly “cloned” and devalued by a thousand AI bots, the financial incentive to innovate disappears. If you can’t make a living being an original artist, you might choose a “safer” job, leading to a stagnation of human culture.
3. Quality vs. Quantity → The “Slop” Problem
In Communism: Factories produced 10,000 bad shoes just to hit a quota, because there was no “profit” in making 1,000 great shoes. Factories that hit the quota (quantity) were rewarded. There was no reward for making 10 great shoes.
In AI: We are seeing a flood of “AI Slop”—low-quality, generic books on Amazon, soulless LinkedIn posts, and “dead internet” art. When the cost of production is zero, the market is flooded with quantity, making it nearly impossible for a high-quality human creator to be seen or heard.
The “Tragedy of the Commons”
The biggest mapping is what economists call the Tragedy of the Commons.
In communism it describes how individuals, acting in their own self-interest on a shared, finite resource (a “common”), will inevitably overuse and deplete it, leading to ruin for everyone.
In AI, the “Commons” is the slop machine. AI needs fresh human data to stay relevant and “smart.” Remember Ghibli and its overuse? If AI makes it impossible for humans to get paid for creating that data, humans will stop creating.
The Result: The AI eventually starts training on its own output (AI training on AI), leading to a “Model Collapse” where everything becomes a blurry, distorted copy of a copy.
How can we fix this?
Just as some communist countries moved toward “Market Socialism,” the creative world is looking for middle grounds:
Data Royalties: Forcing AI companies to pay a “tax” or license fee to the humans they trained on.
Proof of Person hood: Labels that say “100% Human Made” to restore a “premium price” for human effort.
The “Opt-Out” Movement: Tools like Glaze or Nightshade that “poison” images so AI can’t learn from them, effectively “fencing off” the private property of the mind.
Nikhil from Medianama has a good write up on AI and copyright.
