--- title: "A License to Prompt" description: "A vocal minority told me I wasn't entitled to use a frontier model for a \"simple\" diagram. It reveals a split running through centuries of regulation: license the person, or license the maker." url: "https://hoeijmakers.net/a-license-to-prompt/" date: 2026-07-05 author: "Rob Hoeijmakers" site: "hoeijmakers.net" language: "en" tags: ["AI Governance"] --- # A License to Prompt The Euler diagram of European trade and institutional agreements, the one untangling EU, EEA, EFTA, Schengen, the eurozone and the customs union, went further than I expected. Close to two hundred thousand views on LinkedIn. At that size, a post stops being just a post. It becomes something closer to a temperature gauge, a rough read of what a few hundred thousand people actually think when the subject is AI. And the reading ran hot. The most common response was not about the diagram itself. When [my piece on Fable 5](https://hoeijmakers.net/fable-is-back-brilliant-and-expensive/) explained how it got made, in one pass, after ChatGPT spent twenty turns on it and Claude Opus produced confident errors, a chorus formed in the comments. Not everyone. A vocal slice of the replies, and they weren't gentle: why do you need AI for that, you're wasting water, don't you have a brain, you stupid fuck, go do it yourself. Nobody claimed the diagram was wrong. The objection was that I was not entitled to make it this way. ## Two things are happening at once The tone is worth separating from the argument, because they're doing different work. The harshness is personal: some people clearly need somewhere to put a general anxiety about AI, and a stranger's viral post is a convenient place to put it. That's a psychological release valve, not a policy position, and I don't think it deserves more analysis than that. But underneath the anger was an actual claim, made politely by some and violently by others: that power should be rationed by task, that a frontier model is wasted, even illegitimate, on something "simple." Strip the emotion away and what's left is a form of licensing. Not issued by any authority, just enforced by a crowd. Which raises the question nobody quite asked out loud: should there be an actual authority for this? ## A third objection, quieter than the other two Some replies weren't about desert at all. They raised something more technical: that matching the right model to the right task is genuinely hard, because most people have no real feel for what's in their hands. Fable alone comes with effort dials, low, high, extra high, max, sometimes a choice of model entirely. Someone picked a setting, it happened to solve six overlapping frameworks in one pass. But could they have predicted that in advance? Could most users say why "high" succeeds where "low" fails, or tell confident-and-wrong apart from quietly-right? That's not entitlement, it's closer to a literacy gap. The AI Act's Article 4 already names this, an AI literacy duty, aimed at organisations. This version of the objection is really asking whether individuals need the same thing: not permission to use the tool, but some minimum understanding of what the dials actually do. It's the one objection in the pile that survives contact with scrutiny. ## License the person, or license the maker Here's the split that matters, and it cuts through most of the history of technology regulation in one line: you can license the operator, or you can license the provider. Almost never both. **License the operator** when the tool can hurt other people in untrained hands. Steam boilers exploded often enough in the nineteenth century that countries began certifying stationary engineers. Cars gave us the driving licence. Ham radio requires an exam. Pesticides require an applicator certificate. Drones, a consumer product you can buy at a media store, now come with EU competence certificates sorted by weight class. In every case, the danger sits with a third party: a factory floor, a pedestrian, an unlicensed frequency, a poisoned field. And a driving licence isn't just permission, it certifies you can read the dashboard. That's the thread connecting this tradition back to the literacy objection above. **License the provider** when the danger sits upstream instead. Electricity, computing, the internet, medicine: nobody holds a licence to own a laptop or take a prescribed pill. The obligations sit on the utility, the platform, the manufacturer, the pharmacy. The user is simply trusted, or ignored. [The AI Act](https://hoeijmakers.net/learning-to-work-with-the-eu-ai-act/) is unambiguous about which side it picked. Obligations land on providers and deployers, sorted by the risk of the use case, never on the individual for personal use. Article 4 comes closest, an AI literacy duty, but it's a duty on organisations, not a licence on a person. Brussels, of all regulators, looked at the most powerful general-purpose technology of the decade and put the licence on the maker, not the hand on the keyboard. ## Why the crowd was still wrong That choice tracks the historical pattern precisely. Operator licences exist where misuse harms someone else. My diagram harmed nobody. What the angriest commenters were demanding, whether they'd have put it this way or not, was operator licensing for a case that has always, historically, sat on the provider side of the line. There's no tradition of licensing people against wasting a tool's potential, only against hurting others with it. The irony is that real gatekeeping for AI already exists, just at the provider level. The export controls that [briefly took Fable 5 offline](https://hoeijmakers.net/fable-5-is-gone-the-switch-was-always-there/) were decided in Washington and executed by Anthropic; a switch thrown at the level of states and companies, nowhere near the level of one person and one task. Access to models is regulated. Just never at the level my loudest critics were operating on. Maybe that's the cleanest way to hold the whole episode. The formal system asks: can this technology harm someone else? The informal one, running hot in a comment section, asks: does this person deserve this much power? Europe built its entire AI framework on the first question. Some of my replies were entirely stuck on the second. A few, the quieter ones, were asking a third question worth taking seriously: does this person even know what they're holding?