August 21, 2026

One morning, earlier this week, I was scrolling through my Substack feed, reading post after post by white women writers who are angry—I mean hopping mad—about the present state of artificial intelligence.

They are angry that their writing, their intellectual property and their creative output have been used to train AI models without their permission. They are angry that technology companies have built enormously valuable products, in part, by consuming work that they created. They are angry that their words can be absorbed into these systems, reproduced and repurposed without their consent, attribution or compensation. And now some are confronting an especially bitter irony: After having their work used to train AI, they find themselves accused of using AI to produce their own writing.

I understand the grievance.  What caught my attention, however, was something else.

One writer observed that humans have always stolen from one another. What makes what is happening with AI different, they argued, is the scale.

Hold up, wait a minute…what??  If scale is what makes this kind of theft especially dangerous, why stop at AI?

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Look, there is a throughline here that I find difficult to ignore.

At the heart of the current fight over AI is a very old proposition: If I possess sufficient power to take what you have produced, I can—and will—take it. I don’t care about getting your consent.  Your claim to the fruits of your own labor is subordinate to my ability to extract value from it. And if I can build a system capable of faster, more efficient extraction at a massive scale, the rewards flowing from your labor can accumulate somewhere else entirely.

We have seen this mindset before.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the system of racialized chattel slavery it produced depended upon its most grotesque possible expression. Black African people themselves were made property, in order to justify the brutal extraction of their labor. Their bodies, skills, knowledge, reproductive capacity and productive lives could be converted into wealth for someone else.

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AI theft and slavery are not equivalent harms. I am not arguing that they are.

I am arguing that the mindset that makes extraction possible deserves examination wherever it appears.

Because if you can understand why taking someone's creative labor without meaningful consent is wrong, you already understand something about extraction.

If you can understand why profiting from someone else's work without appropriately compensating them is wrong, you understand something about exploitation.

If you can understand why enormous disparities in technological, financial and institutional power matter, you understand something about power.

And if you believe the scale at which all of this can now occur makes the harm even more dangerous, then you understand something about scale.

So why stop there?

Why does the moral analysis become crystal clear when the subject is your writing, your labor, your ownership and your livelihood, but become cloudy when the labor in question belonged to Black people?

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At some point, I have to stop assuming that you cannot see the connection.

Perhaps you have chosen not to.

And that choice interests me.

Because racism does not require us to be incapable of understanding harm. Sometimes it asks only that we apply our understanding selectively, in our favor, to our benefit.

We can recognize extraction and condemn it.

We can recognize exploitation and rage against it.

We can recognize the violation of consent and demand that it stop.

We can recognize the danger of concentrated power and insist that those wielding it be held accountable.

We can even recognize that extracting value from other people's labor at massive scale magnifies the injustice.

And then we can decide whose extraction counts.

That is the part of this conversation about AI that I cannot unsee.

The outrage itself demonstrates that the concepts are not difficult to understand. People know what it feels like to say: That belonged to me. I made that. You took it. You benefited from it. I did not agree to this.

Fine.

Follow that thought.

Follow it beyond Silicon Valley. Follow it beyond large language models and copyright law. Follow it beyond the twenty-first century.

Follow the logic of extraction backward and ask what happens when the people whose labor is being taken are not writers with Substack accounts but Black people whose very personhood was transformed into property so that everything they produced could “legally” belong to somebody else.

And if your response is that slavery was different, of course it was.  

News flash:  It was actually much, much worse.

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The scale of AI theft should alarm us all. So should the position writers now find themselves in: Guarding their work against systems powerful enough to take it, absorb it, profit from it and leave its creators to defend their ownership of what was theirs in the first place.

But the mindset behind that extraction did not arrive with the opportunity that artificial intelligence presented.  It is much older than the technology being used to power it. That is the throughline I am asking us to examine.

Again, I’m not arguing that AI theft and slavery are equal:  They are not. I’m asking you if you can recognize that the proposition underneath the extraction is the same: I have the power to take what you produce, and therefore I will.

If you recognize the injustice of that proposition now, follow it backward.

Ask where else it has appeared. Ask whose labor it has extracted. Ask what systems have been built around it. Ask who accumulated wealth because of it. And ask what made that extraction morally acceptable to the people who benefited from it.

The history is there.

The mindset is there.

The question is whether we are willing to see it.