The Freedom To Create

In August, during the summer break, I took a guided tour of Bellavista in Santiago de Chile. Around the university’s law faculty on Pío Nono, street art covers entire façades throughout the neighborhood.

Two traditions meet on these walls. The Brigada Ramona Parra, formed by young communists, painted murals supporting Salvador Allende. After the 1973 coup, the Pinochet regime whitewashed them. Another language later joined this political tradition: New York graffiti, carried by hip-hop films and returning exiles.

It was fascinating to hear about the strict unwritten code governing who can paint what, where, and when. Permission from the wall’s owner matters. So does respect for existing paintings. Breaking the code invites retaliation: the offender’s own work gets painted over, and their reputation suffers.

Street artists may be a surprisingly organized community, but they are not a fellowship of saints. Rivalry for space and recognition is fierce. Yet the competitors remain mutually vulnerable. Respecting the code protects their own work. Restraint holds the system together.

Self-governance is not inherently self-sustaining. In ‘The Beach’ (2000), one of my favorite movies of all time, an apparently well-organized community on an idyllic island proves unable to accommodate the shocks that disturb it and eventually implodes.

Elinor Ostrom, a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, studied under what conditions collective systems can govern themselves in a durable manner. Her research into forests, fisheries, and irrigation challenged the assumption that shared resources – in the case of street art, wall space – must either be privatized or controlled by the state. Instead, she showed that users could successfully govern themselves and self-regulate.

In ‘Governing the Commons’ (1990), she identified the factors supporting such a system: the resource and its users are clearly defined; rules fit local circumstances; users help shape them; behavior is monitored by users or people accountable to them; breaches bring graduated sanctions; disputes have accessible remedies; and outside authorities recognize the right to organize.

Can the large language model industry build an equivalent system of restraint? As in street art, intense competition alone is not a reason to dismiss self-governance.

AI labs have already made voluntary commitments covering external testing, information-sharing, and public reporting. But commitments by individual firms are not yet a system of industry self-governance. That requires participants to accept scrutiny and enforced consequences for breaking the rules.*

There is a precedent discussed in various circles. After the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, U.S. nuclear operators  created the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations. Alongside statutory regulation, INPO evaluates plants and assigns performance ratings that influence insurance premiums. Peer scrutiny carries a financial consequence.

The real question is whether AI labs would accept enforceable limits as the price of their freedom to create, as Bellavista’s artists do, and nuclear operators learned to do after Three Mile Island.

* The UN illustrates the distinction between binding rules and reliable enforcement: its Security Council has enforcement powers, but their exercise depends on member states’ political agreement and cooperation.