AI draws on humanity’s knowledge. Ayana Gray explores who controls it, who profits, and how people can fight for privacy, democratic oversight, and a fair share.
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Summary
Artificial intelligence raises a fundamental democratic question: Who controls technology built from humanity’s accumulated knowledge? In this interview, Ayana Gray, founder of the Center for Democratic AI, challenges the corporate narrative that the public must simply accept whatever Silicon Valley delivers. She connects privacy, ownership, and public participation to a larger struggle over whether technological progress enriches a privileged few or serves society.
- Corporate control is a choice. Gray rejects the claim that AI’s development follows an inevitable path beyond democratic intervention.
- Privacy can lose when profits dictate priorities. Her research into the history of internet cookies explores how commercial interests reshaped debates about tracking.
- Collective knowledge demands a public return. The discussion challenges corporations’ ability to capture extraordinary benefits from generations of human creativity and learning.
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Accountability must accompany development. Decisions about training, deployment, and oversight belong in public debate.
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Education builds political power. Gray’s organization seeks to equip people with the knowledge and practical tools needed to influence AI policy.
The public deserves more than an invitation to consume AI products. It deserves enforceable rights, meaningful governing power, and a fair share of the prosperity its collective contributions help create.
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AI Runs on Humanity’s Knowledge. Why Should Billionaires Own the Profits?
Artificial intelligence has become another battleground in the struggle over who produces wealth and who gets to claim it. However, it is essential to recognize that generations of writers, artists, researchers, educators, programmers, and ordinary people created the knowledge that makes these systems useful. Yet we have allowed powerful corporations to position themselves to control access, dictate the terms, and collect the profits. Ayana Gray’s interview challenges that arrangement at its foundation: the public has the right to shape technology that draws so heavily from public life.
, founder of the Center for Democratic AI, rejects the mythology of inevitability. AI does not arrive with a predetermined ownership structure or an economic commandment requiring billionaire enrichment. People choose its financing, training practices, commercial applications, and governing rules. Calling those choices inevitable encourages surrender. Recognizing them as choices creates room for resistance, democratic negotiation, and alternatives that serve working people.
Ayana’s research into internet cookies provides a useful warning. In the interview, Gray describes early debates over privacy and the growing influence of advertising interests. That history raises an urgent question: what happens when commercial incentives reward tracking people? The Federal Trade Commission’s September 2024 investigation documented extensive surveillance across major social media and streaming companies, alongside inadequate privacy protections. Surveillance capitalism turns participation in everyday life into material for private accumulation.
AI extends the ownership debate. Corporations use enormous collections of human expression to develop commercial systems. The legal questions require specificity: the U.S. Copyright Office’s 2025 training report explains that some uses may qualify as fair use while others may not. But the democratic question reaches beyond any individual lawsuit. Even where the law permits a practice, society can demand better rules for consent, compensation, public access, and how economic gains are distributed. Legal permission does not settle whether an arrangement serves the public.
The interview’s strongest economic challenge concerns collective contribution. An industry built on accumulated human knowledge cannot credibly treat its prosperity as the isolated achievement of a few owners. A progressive response should advance public investment with public returns, cooperative development, creator protections, and taxation that funds universal services. The bottom line is that AI must be categorized as a utility owned by all and run in the interests of all. Such policies can recognize shared contributions while protecting personal information. Additionally, democratic ownership must strengthen privacy; it cannot become another excuse to treat everyone’s intimate life as freely available raw material.
Concentrated infrastructure makes these demands especially urgent. Workers also deserve governing power. The common assessment is that one in four jobs worldwide faces potential exposure to generative AI. Exposure does not dictate layoffs. Employers and policymakers decide whether productivity supports shorter hours, better pay, and improved services—or becomes another justification for cutting payroll and intensifying work. Unions must grow and ensure the former.
Political branding offers no substitute for accountability. Trump’s September 29, 2026 directive instructed executive agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in specified government communications. A presidential vocabulary change does not, by itself, establish a technological breakthrough. Gray’s larger point remains decisive: people should interrogate the choices behind the spectacle. The democratic task is to organize public power so that technological development protects rights, distributes prosperity, and answers to the people whose lives it changes.
