I'd have gone with either italicizing "their" or, if not available, capitalizing.
Think of it this way... quotation marks or for either direct references or otherwise can be supplemented by preceding the word with ", so called," and make sense.
Otherwise, it's a pretty solid point you're making.
The whole point of education was propagate useful information into the future economically, and us egoist meat suits seem to mean it makes the individual essential.
Now we have machines to store the data for us; individuals as hard drives is less important.
The only reason we believe what we do is past people told us to believe it. There’s no physical obligation to propagate social memes and norms.
Get over it. The world would be better off if a bunch of helicopter operators stop fighting over everything as if their high minded education isn’t more than some social recipes memorized to teach others.
Go do something creative for yourself rather than babysit BS of the dying in a physical reality that doesn’t care you exist.
Why should anybody do something creative for themselves when you’re just going to steal their work by plugging into into an LLM’s training set and then use it as if nobody owns it?
Copyright gives artists, musicians and writers the same right to control their work as carpenters, bakers, and furniture makers. What you call "rent seeking" is what others call the right to bargain for how much they get paid. If you want these arts to exist, you need to protect the creators by giving them the same status in society as people who make physical goods.