The plan won’t undermine the profitability of the AI industry. They have huge profit margins already.

Followers of high finance are familiar with the old principle of privatizing profits and socializing losses — that is, treating the former as the rightful property of investors and shareholders while sticking the public with the latter. It’s the principle that gave us taxpayer bailouts of big banks and the auto companies during the last recession.

Investors in artificial intelligence are taking the idea one step further in fighting against lawsuits filed by artists and writers asserting that the AI development process involves copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The AI folks say that nothing they’re doing infringes copyright. But they also argue that their technology itself is so important to the future of the human race that no obstacles as trivial as copyright law should stand in their way.

The only way AI can fulfill its tremendous potential is if the individuals and businesses currently working to develop these technologies are free to do so lawfully and nimbly.

— Andreessen Horowitz

They say that if they’re forced to pay fees to copyright holders simply for using their creative works to “train” AI chatbots and other such programs, most AI firms might be forced out of business.

Frank Landymore of Futurism.com had perhaps the most irreducibly succinct reaction to this assertion: “Boohoo.”

The truth is that the investment community sees AI as a potential goldmine. One study placed the infusion of investment cash into the market in the last quarter alone at nearly $18 billion — rising higher even as investments in other startup categories have been shrinking.

Measured against that torrent, the AI industry’s claim that having to comply with the ownership rights of writers and artists would wreck their financial models falls a little flat.