AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage; The Guardian, January 18, 2026

Cory Doctorow, The Guardian; AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

"The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use “disrupt” here in its most disreputable tech-bro sense.

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AI that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.

That is the $13tn growth story that Morgan Stanley is telling. It’s why big investors are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We would have to figure out what to do with all these unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that does not mean it is going to save anyone money...

After more than 20 years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That is why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium.

And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they have defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle.

The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission...

AI is a bubble and bubbles are terrible.

Bubbles transfer the life savings of normal people who are just trying to have a dignified retirement to the wealthiest and most unethical people in our society, and every bubble eventually bursts, taking their savings with it."