[drooby]

Nobody is proposing that AI companies track down individual contributors and pay them based on their specific contribution. That's not how any of this works.

The Alaska Permanent Fund doesn't pay Alaskans based on how much oil was under their particular backyard. It pays a dividend from a public fund because the resource is collectively owned. The mechanism is simple: companies extract a public resource, a percentage goes into a fund, the fund pays out to the public.

And the infrastructure comparison doesn't quite work. The people who built computing hardware and internet infrastructure were paid for that work at market rates by the companies that hired them. The billions of people whose writing, code, images, and knowledge trained these models weren't paid anything for that specific use. That gap is the whole point.