Apple is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered glasses, a pendant, and AirPods

[Polybius]

45. I wasn't being sarcastic at all when I said you're a good person

I meant it. You clearly care deeply about fairness, exploitation, and concentrated power. That comes through strongly, and I respect that conviction even though we land in different places.

Where I struggle is with the idea that there’s only one morally permissible conclusion here, and that anyone who doesn’t adopt it is engaging in hypocrisy on the level of slave-owning founders. That comparison feels disproportionate. It turns a complex, modern dispute about technology, copyright law, and corporate power into a binary test of character.

I agree that “publicly available” is not the same as “public domain.” I also agree that courts and legislatures can favor the wealthy. None of that makes your concerns illegitimate. But it also doesn’t automatically settle the legal or moral debate in one direction. There are scholars, artists, lawyers, and yes, liberals, who disagree in good faith about whether training models on publicly accessible material constitutes theft under existing law, or whether the right answer is new licensing regimes, compulsory compensation systems, or stricter limits. That’s not moral blindness; it’s disagreement about how to apply principles in a new context.

You see using AI as endorsement. I see it more like participating in an emerging technology while also supporting better guardrails and accountability. Wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses isn’t, in my mind, an advertisement for oligarchy. It’s using a consumer device that exists in a legal market. I don’t feel that doing so means I’ve decided creators rights don’t matter.

I understand why this feels like a moral line in the sand to you. It just doesn’t feel that absolute to me. I’m not carving out an exception because it benefits me. I’m weighing tradeoffs in a system that’s already messy and evolving. That doesn’t make you bad for opposing it. It just means we’re drawing the line in different places without either of us intending harm.

I also need to push back on the claim that “no reasonable liberal can disagree” on whether AI is theft.

Liberals disagree with each other all the time about hard edge cases in law, especially when technology moves faster than statutes. Copyright law has always involved tensions: fair use, transformative use, indexing, caching, search engines, data mining, parody, sampling. Courts have repeatedly ruled that copying for certain intermediate or analytical purposes can be lawful even when the underlying works remain fully copyrighted. That’s not the same as saying “publicly available equals public domain.” It’s saying the law distinguishes between ownership of a work and how it may be analyzed or processed.

Search engines copy entire webpages to index them. Plagiarism detection tools copy student essays to compare them. Google Books scanned millions of copyrighted books, and courts ultimately found that to be transformative fair use because it didn’t substitute for the original works. You can disagree with those rulings, but they show that reasonable legal minds (many of them progressive) have not treated all large scale copying as automatic theft.

So when someone argues that model training might fall under existing fair use doctrines, or that the right solution is compensation frameworks rather than prohibition, that’s not “pretending publicly available means public domain.” It’s engaging in a real legal debate about what constitutes infringement versus transformative analysis.

You’re absolutely right that corporations defend their own IP aggressively. But pointing that out doesn’t resolve the underlying legal question either.

It’s fair to argue that current AI training practices should require licensing or payment. It’s fair to argue they shouldn’t. What’s not fair, in my view, is declaring that one side of that debate is inherently unreasonable or morally disqualified from being liberal.

This is an unsettled legal and ethical issue. Reasonable liberals can disagree about it without abandoning their values.