Is that theft?

Question

The machine now writes book reviews so good that nobody hires human reviewers anymore. It learned to do this from their reviews. They trained their own replacement, for free, without being asked.

Accepted Answer

You just found the real battlefield. Courts barely care that machines read — they care whether the output competes with the people it read. 70% of Americans say AI companies should compensate the writers they trained on. (70% of Americans answer "Theft" — AI Policy Inst., 2024)