AI and the Civilization Living off Intellectual Rent

• Author: Pedro Tellería
• Date: 05/29/26
• Web: PedroTelleria.com
• Topic: AI, intellectual property, incentives, digital economy
• Series: Implosion of Content

Years ago, Google News anticipated a conflict that is now returning, multiplied by artificial intelligence. The service did not publish full articles from media outlets, but it did organize news, display headlines, snippets, and links. For many users, that was enough: they read the summary, understood the main idea, and did not always enter the original page. For publishers, the problem was obvious: fewer visits meant less audience, less first-party data, and less advertising revenue. In Spain, the tension went as far as the shutdown of Google News in 2014 after the so-called AEDE canon, and years later it evolved into new legal formulas, negotiations, and remuneration commitments.

Something similar is happening with AI, but on a much larger scale. We are no longer talking only about headlines and leads. We are talking about systems capable of reading, synthesizing, comparing, and answering the user directly. ChatGPT, Claude, xAI/Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity do not merely organize links: they offer complete answers. And Google, facing the transformation of traditional search, has incorporated AI Overviews, Gemini, and AI Mode into its own search ecosystem.

The result is a profound change in the economics of content. If the user gets a sufficient answer inside the AI interface or the search engine itself, there are fewer reasons to visit the page that originally produced the information. Pew Research observed in 2025 that, when Google displayed an AI summary, users clicked on traditional results much less often: 8% versus 15% when that summary did not appear. The problem, therefore, is not only legal. There is not always a literal copy that is easy to pursue. The problem is economic: AI can capture the usefulness of content without necessarily returning traffic, revenue, or proportional recognition to those who made it possible.

That is where the real question begins: if value is captured by those who process information, but not by those who create it, what incentives remain to produce the next generation of knowledge?

1. The problem is not copying. It is incentives

For years, we discussed the internet as if it were a problem of access. Everyone should be able to read. Everyone should be able to publish. Everyone should be able to share. And that was, to a large extent, wonderful. The web turned millions of people into publishers. It democratized information. It allowed an idea written in a room to reach anywhere in the world.

But now we are entering another phase.

• The question is no longer only who can access content.

The question is who can capture it, process it, turn it into a product, and benefit from it.

Reading an article is one thing. Using millions of articles to train a model is another. Learning from a book is one thing. Digesting entire libraries, extracting patterns, erasing visible sources, and returning a new, comfortable, immediate, and apparently original answer to the user is another.

Artificial intelligence has changed the center of the debate. The problem is no longer literal copying. The problem is value extraction. And that forces us to ask a deeper question: if creators receive no return, what incentive do they have to keep creating?

2. The mammoth, the spear, and the first profitable idea

Imagine a primitive tribe. The strongest hunt. They run faster. They hit harder. They throw stones and spears with more power. When a mammoth appears, the tribe charges at it. Some die. Others are injured. If everything goes well, they get food. It is a heroic, brutal, and rather inefficient system.

Then someone different appears. He is not the strongest. He would not win a fight against the big men of the tribe. But he observes. He thinks. He connects things. He discovers that there is no need to attack the mammoth head-on. It is enough to frighten the herd, coordinate several members, use noise, feathers, fire, and shadows. To look like a larger animal. To push the mammoths toward a cliff. The tribe no longer gets one animal after a bloody battle. It can get several almost without fighting.

That person has created value. Not with physical strength, but with an idea. But if he teaches his technique for free, everyone learns it. The tribe benefits, yes. But he becomes weak again. He no longer controls the value he created.

That primitive example contains an enormous truth: societies progress when they discover how to protect, reward, and multiply useful ideas.

3. Production does not appear by itself

This problem does not belong only to the world of ideas. We have already seen it in material production. An economy does not function only because there are workers. It also needs capital, risk, direction, coordination, management, technical improvement, innovation, and responsibility.

Someone detects an opportunity. Someone risks money. Someone organizes people. Someone designs processes. Someone improves a machine. Someone finds a more efficient way to do the same thing with less cost, less time, or fewer errors. When a system rewards those functions, imperfectly but in a real way, it creates incentives for more of them to appear. When it punishes, ignores, or confiscates them, it reduces their appearance.

This was one of the great failures of many collectivist models (the former Soviet Union, North Korea, Castro's Cuba, and others). Not that they wanted to distribute better. That is another debate. Their deeper problem was assuming that production would keep appearing even if the return to those who took risks, contributed knowledge and ideas, organized resources, or added differential productivity was weakened.

A society can distribute what already exists for a time. The difficult thing is to create what comes next.

4. Intellectual property was a bargain

Intellectual property has always been imperfect. Sometimes it protects too much. Sometimes it protects too little. Sometimes it favors the large player that can pay lawyers and leaves the small creator defenseless. Sometimes it blocks progress. Sometimes it enables abuse. But its original logic was powerful.

• The patent says: reveal your invention and, in exchange, you will have exclusivity for a time. After that, society will incorporate that knowledge.

• Copyright says: if you write, compose, record, design, or create a work, you will be able to control its exploitation for a period.

• Trade secrecy says: if revealing your idea weakens you, you can protect it by not publishing it.

They are different answers to the same problem: how to make creation remain rational. Society needs access to knowledge. But it also needs someone to pay the cost of producing it.

A vaccine does not appear by moral spontaneity. A serious book does not write itself. Investigative journalism, a cultural work, or a technical discovery requires time, money, talent, and risk.

5. The internet broke the copy. AI breaks the source

The internet had already weakened classical protection. Copying became free. Distribution became instant. Content began to circulate without friction. For users, it was extraordinary. For many creators, it was ambiguous. They gained audience, but they lost control.

Even so, the relationship remained relatively visible. The search engine took you to a website. The social network took you to a profile. The video was watched on the creator's channel. The article was in the publication. The author could receive traffic, advertising, subscriptions, reputation, or sales.

AI changes that architecture. It no longer necessarily needs to take you to the source. It can give you the answer directly. It can summarize a twenty-minute video. It can condense a book. It can turn an essay into ten points. It can take a complex idea and return it in an academic, accessible, aggressive, or commercial tone. It does not necessarily copy the paragraph. It captures the essence.

And that is the crack. Classical law protects visible copying better than invisible extraction. It protects the sentence better than the structure. It protects the specific work better than the pattern. AI does not need to steal a page to empty its value. It only needs to absorb it, mix it, and return it without making the user go back to the origin.

6. The new extractor of value

For years, big platforms promised distribution: publish here and you will reach more people. That promise worked. Millions of creators handed over text, images, video, opinion, data, comments, tutorials, reviews, conversations, and knowledge. They did it because there was a return. Not always money. Sometimes reputation. Sometimes community. Sometimes influence. Sometimes clients.

But the model is changing with AI. The platform (Google, for example) no longer only distributes. It can now synthesize. It can answer. It can replace part of the experience. It can place itself between the creator and the audience not as a bridge, but as the final filter. That is much more than intermediation. It is value capture.

And it does not affect only articles or videos. It affects all digital content: comments, emails, images, code, databases, histories, sensors, cameras, records, energy consumption, mobility, purchases, habits, documents, patents, ideas. Everything that can be processed can become raw material.

7. The degenerative loop

The main risk is not that AI helps us too much. The risk is that it breaks the cycle that funds creation. The healthy cycle is simple: someone creates value, receives a return, and that return incentivizes new creation.

The unhealthy cycle is also simple: someone creates value, someone else captures it, the user receives utility, the creator loses return, incentives shrink, original creation falls, derivative content rises, and AI increasingly recycles what already exists.

At first, it is not noticeable. Because there is a lot of past material to process. Countless books. Millions of websites. Billions of images. Decades of video. Mountains of code. Scientific archives. Forums. Manuals. Courses. Music. Opinion. Journalism. Art. AI can live for a long time off that deposit. But the question is who will fund what comes next.

8. The political question of the digital century

Perhaps AI will not only recycle. Perhaps it will also invent. Perhaps it will discover medicines. Perhaps it will propose scientific hypotheses. Perhaps it will design materials. That is possible. It should not be denied. But even if AI creates, the question does not disappear. It changes.

Who owns that creation? The user who asked for the answer? The company that trained the model? The authors whose data made the training possible? The society that accumulated the base knowledge over centuries? No one?

AI should not be blocked out of fear. But it should not be accepted as a natural force without rules, without property, without return, and without responsibility. The right question is institutional: what incentive architecture allows new knowledge to keep existing?

There may be licenses, collective agreements, micropayments, mandatory attribution, open models, compensation funds, rights over training, database protection, closed communities, subscriptions, and trade secrets. There will not be a single solution. But there is a principle: whoever systematically captures value must return value to the system that makes it possible.

9. Closing

The great battle over content is not about isolated articles, viral videos, or copyright lawsuits. It is about something deeper. It is about whether society will be able to keep alive the circuit between editorial creation, reward, and innovation.

Capitalism, with all its imperfections, understood something basic: differential value needs a return. The entrepreneur, the inventor, the manager, the researcher, the artist, the editor, the writer, or the thinker are not ornaments of the system. They are part of the machinery that produces the future.

If we disconnect reward from creation, we will be able to keep consuming for a time. We will have summaries, variations, syntheses, instant answers, and versions adapted to each user. But perhaps we will be consuming the intellectual capital accumulated by previous generations.

And then the phrase stops being an elegant warning and becomes a diagnosis: a civilization that does not remunerate its creators ends up living off intellectual rent until it runs out.