I think we’re talking past each other. Your argument applies if we’re talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that’s unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn’t a moral claim at all, it’s simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.

Enclosure in the digital space isn’t an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.

I mentioned a “mature” stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It’s eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.