Is AI the Real Thief? Signatures, Bullets, and the Trust Nobody Reported Stolen

Everyone is asking whether AI is stealing jobs. But when an illustrator with fifteen years of practice uses AI to work faster, nobody calls it theft. So who is the thief? The machine? The companies that built it? The person who never wrote a paragraph in his life and now publishes twenty books a day? Or, uncomfortably, the rest of us? In this episode, a composer in Beirut climbs six flights of stairs in a blackout to confront a relative running a roomful of phones that stream fake songs all night, and he makes her an offer she can't quite refuse. Then we look at Amazon's three-books-a-day limit, the AI streaming fraud case with bands called Calorie Screams and Calvinistic Dust, the landmark $1.5 billion settlement over pirated books used to train an AI, a famous parable about bridges that turns out to be shakier than its reputation, an economist's Nobel-winning insight about used cars, and the ancient root of the word "author." Funny for most of the way, and then not. Join the conversation on Patreon at dannyballan.com or at englishpluspodcast.com.