Meanwhile, Common Crawl’s executive director, Rich Skrenta, has publicly made the case that AI models should be able to access anything on the internet. “The robots are people too,” he told me, and should therefore be allowed to “read the books” for free.

The shamelessness of the propaganda reaches new heights. The industry shills no longer even attempt to make arguments, they just rely on people repeating their slogans.

It's just an economic argument. Paying for content licenses would be a massive operational expense. It's much cheaper to hire a couple of lawyers to invent a pseudo-philosophical justification for why you shouldn't have to pay.