People are rightly ridiculing OpenAI over its accusations of Deepseek using their output to train their model, but most people are missing the truly terrifying implications here. The far more worrying aspect here is that OpenAI is suggesting that there are some cases in which they own the output of their model. Now think for a minute what this means in the world of tomorrow where so much will be generated by AI (and already is): all the software code, the emails we send each others, the videos and images, etc. Do you want to live in a future where, if for some reason the AI giants are dissatisfied with the way you use the output of their model, they can claim ownership of it? A future where every piece of content touched by AI - which might be virtually everything in the world of tomorrow - comes with invisible strings attached? The implications for innovation and creativity are staggering. Small businesses and independent developers who rely on AI tools could find themselves trapped in a web of intellectual property claims. Worse, we're looking at a future where the very act of learning and building upon existing knowledge becomes gated by the interests of AI giants. This would be techno-feudalism on steroids: if we don't challenge this now, we risk sleepwalking into a future where human creativity and innovation become the property of a bunch of AI overlords, and a world where they can dictate not only who gets to innovate, but what kind of progress is acceptable based on their own interests.