The brilliant content creator economist Matt Hill has posted a video “How Piracy Accidentally Created AI” to the @EconNerds channel on YouTube.
The video is so funny (and smart!) that I encourage you to sit back and watch it all the way through. Around minute 2, he gets to the topic of online piracy.
The 4 minute mark is where I am featured to explain my paper with Bart Wilson: You Wouldn’t Steal a Car: Moral Intuition for Intellectual Property (SSRN link)
The @EconNerds channel on YouTube has over 100 engaging videos like this to help you learn economics. You can also find Econ Nerds updates on X/Twitter
I summarized our findings in a previous blog “Summary of You Wouldn’t Steal a Car,” but Matt’s video is more fun and quite technically accurate, so now everyone can just watch it.
Economist Writing Every Day 
The AI example is actually the first scenario that I can think of where there is a public backlash to non-rival good sharing. If someone is personally opposed to pirating, then they don’t have to engage in it even as others do. In contrast, they don’t have the flexibility to avoid AI, and that could be a betrayal of those personal preferences.
It’s also intriguing that as part of the backlash people are trying to insert their version of poisoned data, like r/poisonai, to (in their mind) artificially raise transaction costs of non-rival online information.
LikeLike
Great job, Joy.
I wonder — AI may facilitate “sharing” which may reduce incentives for producing films the old fashioned way, costing $50 million; but AI is probably near the point where it can produce films (write script, generate footage) for much less than that
LikeLike