However, I think he did take donations for early access to new titles,
When video game companies accept money for early access to their games, that’s a sale. You give them money, they give you access. I’m not sure why that wouldn’t also apply here.
From your description, unless you were allowed to donate $0 for access, that sounds a lot like a sale to me.
Here’s my mildly diplomatic answer that’d probably get tossed:
Piracy has become a plague on our society, but there’s a more sinister cause to it. The average labourer can hardly afford to pay the same fee to access culture that the wealthy person can, and this has caused a significant and justified uptick in piracy.
This situation can be averted by increasing minimum wages and supporting universal basic income. If everyone knew they could at least make ends meet, they’d have some left over to pay for the culture that mattered to them.
Firefox users who never left: feeling of smugness intensifies
Replace AI in your argument with industrial machinery, and you’ll get your answer. People have always had similar concerns about automation. There are some problems, but it isn’t with the technology itself.
The first problem is the concentration of wealth. Societal automation efforts need to start to be viewed as something belonging to everyone, and the profits generated need to go back in to supporting society. This’ll need to be solved to move forward peacefully.
The second problem is failure to deal with externalities. The true cost of automation needs to be accounted for from cradle to grave including all externalities. This means the pollution caused by LLM energy use needs to be a part of the cost of running the LLM, for example.