I've been thinking about the whole AI and copyright mess again, and honestly, the more I read about it, the more annoyed I get.
Especially when organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation get involved.
Before anyone jumps down my throat: no, I'm not saying EFF literally went out and said, "AI art should have copyright." That's not what they said. Their position is more complicated than that. EFF has argued against expanding copyright law in ways that would restrict AI development, and they've argued that existing copyright law can already deal with a lot of the problems surrounding generative AI.
And I understand the argument.
I just don't agree with where this conversation can end up.
Because here's the thing:
Why the hell are we even considering giving AI-generated content more copyright protection?
Copyright was created around human creativity. Someone writes something. Someone draws something. Someone records something. Someone makes something.
A fucking computer generating 500 pictures because somebody typed a sentence isn't the same thing.
The U.S. Copyright Office has actually been pretty clear about this. Purely AI-generated material isn't automatically protected by copyright, and simply typing a prompt isn't enough to make someone the author of the resulting work.
Good.
Keep it that way.
Because I can already see where this could go.
Imagine some company running an AI content farm that spits out thousands of images every single day. They upload all of them and start claiming ownership over whatever the system produced.
Now imagine them sending copyright notices to people for using those images.
That sounds ridiculous, but that's exactly why I don't think we should be rushing toward a world where AI-generated content gets treated like human-made work.
And this is where I get really frustrated with the "AI is just a tool" argument.
A pencil is a tool.
A drawing tablet is a tool.
Photoshop is a tool.
A camera is a tool.
Those tools don't sit there and decide what the finished piece should look like.
Generative AI is different. You give it an instruction, and it produces the actual output. You can obviously have human involvement in the process, but there's a huge difference between someone drawing a picture and someone typing a prompt and picking their favourite result from a pile of generated images.
And before someone tells me that I'm just an artist who doesn't understand technology:
No.
I'm worried about who gets screwed over when this technology becomes normal.
Because we've already got artists worrying about their work being used to train AI systems. We've got writers worrying about their writing being scraped. Musicians worrying about imitation. Programmers worrying about their code being used.
And then we're supposed to turn around and say:
"Okay, now let's figure out how much copyright protection the machine's output should get."
Seriously?
Your work can become training material, but the output gets to become somebody else's protected commercial product?
How does that benefit the original creator?
EFF has made arguments about AI training and fair use that I understand from a legal and technological perspective. They don't want copyright law turned into something so broad that it prevents research and technology from existing.
That's a legitimate concern.
But creators have legitimate concerns too.
And I think the tech industry has gotten way too comfortable treating those concerns like they're just obstacles standing in the way of innovation.
Not everything needs to be optimised for AI.
Sometimes the answer should just be "no".
No, you don't get to scrape everything.
No, you don't automatically get to imitate someone's work.
No, you don't get to replace an entire creative workforce and then tell everyone that it's progress.
And no, I don't think we should build a copyright system that eventually lets AI-generated slop get the same legal protection as something a human spent months creating.
The U.S. Copyright Office's current position is actually one of the things I agree with here: if the machine is determining the expressive elements, that doesn't magically become human authorship.
I think that line is important.
Because once we start blurring it, we're going to have an absolute fucking nightmare.
And let's be honest about something else.
AI companies aren't struggling for power.
They have money.
They have massive amounts of computing power.
They have huge datasets.
They have investors throwing billions of dollars at them.
Artists don't have that.
The average writer doesn't have that.
The average musician doesn't have that.
The average person making things online definitely doesn't have that.
So when I hear people talk about expanding copyright around AI, my first question is:
Who actually benefits from this?
Because I don't want to see a future where a corporation can generate millions of pieces of content and claim ownership over them while actual human creators are struggling to get anyone to look at their work.
I don't want AI companies turning human creativity into training data and then turning around and building an ownership system around the stuff their machines produce.
And I definitely don't want to live in a fucking internet where everything is copyrighted AI garbage.
If copyright is supposed to protect creativity, then maybe we should start by protecting the people doing the creating.
Not the machines.
Not the content farms.
Not the corporations trying to automate everything.
The actual people.