OpenAi CEO Sam Altman stated at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit this week: "We see a future where intelligence will become a utility like electricity and water, and people will buy from us based on usage."

These remarks immediately sparked widespread criticism.

The data used by OpenAI to train its models comes from a large-scale crawling of content from the entire internet, including books, articles, artistic creations, and forum posts. This data is unauthorized and no copyright fees have been paid.

Critics argue that decades of collective human creation, extracted and compressed into models for free, are now being repriced as a "utility," with creators charged per token.

A widely circulated Reddit user wrote: "They fed our lives and creativity to these models, trampled on copyright laws, and now they're selling them back to us as utilities."