There is no artificial intelligence without the vast trove of human knowledge. Today’s generative AI applications were built on a foundation of such information, drawn from across the internet and from various databases totaling, according to at least one estimate, somewhere around 300 billion words. That’s a lot of intellectual property — copyrighted material — much of it produced by generations of professional writers, honed and polished by editors and sent out into the world by publishers in newspapers, magazines, books and more. It’s hard to put an exact price on such a thing or even to measure the collective value of such an incredible library.