The view goes like this. The mind is a kind of information processing system. The brain is the machinery that does the processing. . . . Ilya Sutskever, the then co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, gave a TED talk in October 2023 in which he summarized the entire framework in one line. "AI," he said, "is nothing but digital brains inside large computers." . . .

Our argument is not that the framework is right. Our argument is that even if it is right, the corporation cannot use the framework to escape what it has done. . . . On the industry's own terms, their taking is the taking of a person.

. . . This is the same defense that was run when the cells were Henrietta Lacks's. The cells were biological material. The person was somewhere else. The material could be owned. The person could not. . . .

The AI industry's framework does not permit that distinction. If the pattern is the person, then the cells were never just material, and the human data is not just exhaust. . . . The taking of the cells was the taking of a person. The taking of the human data is the same taking.

The corporation is a person the law invented so that capital could be pooled and risk could be shared. It is an artificial person under the law, and what it produces is what I want to call artificial data... An artificial person produces artificial data about its artificial life, and takes human data as its own, and the law treats all of it as the corporation's to keep.

Nothing in that chain reaches into a human being. And nothing in that chain works in reverse. The corporation cannot turn human data into artificial data by collecting it... The human data the corporation has taken from you is what it was when you made it. The corporation has it. The corporation processes it. The corporation uses it. None of that makes it the corporation's.

I think data is the fourth fictitious commodity. The market treats it as a product. The consequences fall on the people who produce it by being alive ... I disagree. Data is neither capital, nor a commodity. It is not something a corporation makes. It is something you make, by living ... The law currently divides what comes from a person into categories ... The categories were drawn by people who benefited from drawing them ... I watched part of the categorizing of data happen. Earlier in my career, many talented lawyers I knew flocked to the 'new' field of data privacy. My law partner, Charles, and I were doing something different ... The privacy field was not really about privacy. It was about compliance ... Privacy is what keeps the individual an individual at all ... The compliance industry did not protect that fence because the legislature did not ... A 'data subject' is what a person becomes when the framework gets through with them ... And this is what is legal and what is required. When I do data privacy work, this is what I do. This is what every lawyer does ... It was the orderly negotiation of how much of a person the corporation could take and still call itself compliant ... All of it is data. The immutable part and the lived part together are what a person is ... The fiction is in place. The category has been drawn. The framework has done its work. What it has not done is sever the thing the framework was built to take from the person it was taken from.