A Rawlsian Perspective for Generative AI

Today, generative artificial intelligence systems have become widespread and are increasingly used for commercial purposes. Since these systems are trained on copyrighted content, this raises the issue of exploitation of creative labor. John Rawls’s theory of justice offers a promising solution to this problem. Because of its priority of basic rights over considerations of economic gain, this theory of justice imposes strict restrictions on the use of other people’s content in training neural networks, and therefore requires government regulation in this area. In addition, Rawls’s theory also justifies the provision of a guaranteed basic income both as a means of compensation for past violations of rights and as a means of distributing fair shares of social wealth.