OPINION:
When you think of a professional writer, you probably picture someone holed up in a room, in front of a computer screen, revising the same passage again and again until it is just right.
When you think of a professional photographer, you probably picture someone in a studio, adjusting lights and subjects to capture the perfect image. When you think of a professional artist, you probably imagine someone standing before a blank canvas, brush in hand.
Those images come to mind for a reason. For generations, creative work has been understood that way. Yet artificial intelligence is changing all that.
With each passing month, AI becomes better at mimicking human creativity. AI can now draft manuscripts, compose music and generate sophisticated visual works that once required human creativity alone.
It can also improve human-created compositions and generate hundreds or thousands of ideas in seconds. AI promises to assist — and in some cases, potentially replace — workers across a broad range of creative industries.
Equally important, it promises to upend traditional notions of ownership in creative works.
Copyright law has traditionally been the means by which content creators — writers, artists, musicians and the like — have secured remuneration for their work. By granting creators exclusive rights to their works throughout their lifetimes (and beyond), copyright ensures that those who want to use or build upon those works generally must compensate their creators.
Yet copyright’s building blocks do not necessarily transfer well to an AI world.
For one thing, copyright depends on originality, meaning that a work must reflect at least a minimal degree of independent creative expression. To qualify for copyright protection, a work generally must be attributable to a human author who contributed a minimum level of creativity.
These principles also explain why AI is testing the boundaries of copyright law.
When a writer uses AI to generate ideas for a screenplay, does the use of AI — a machine — diminish the amount of copyright protection in the work? To raise a more significant concern, what happens when generative AI relies on an existing creative work to create a new work? So-called large language models assimilate huge quantities of copyrighted material and then use what they “learn” from that material to produce new (machine-generated) works.
All this creates a difficult policy challenge for the creative industries, AI companies and lawmakers. The stakes are particularly high in the United States, which remains a global leader in both creative content and artificial intelligence.
The U.S. is home to Hollywood, Broadway and the Big Five publishing houses. It is also home to many of the companies developing the world’s leading AI platforms. Together, these industries employ millions of Americans and generate more than $1 trillion in economic activity annually.
It is tempting to frame this debate as a conflict between innovation and copyright protection. After all, AI raises difficult questions about authorship, ownership and compensation. Yet history teaches otherwise.
New technologies often disrupt established industries, but they also create new opportunities for creators and consumers alike. The question is not whether AI should shape the future of creative work, but how to ensure that creators remain protected and fairly compensated as it does.
The late Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah understood that innovation and copyright protection need not be at odds. A songwriter himself, he believed technological progress should be embraced, not resisted, and that the law must evolve to ensure creators continue to receive meaningful protection for their work.
That philosophy shaped Hatch’s approach to copyright policy. As a principal sponsor of the landmark Digital Millennium Copyright Act, he helped strike a crucial balance between protecting copyrighted works and allowing the internet to flourish.
Two decades later, he helped lead the enactment of the Music Modernization Act, updating music licensing for the streaming era while ensuring songwriters continue to be fairly compensated.
The AI era demands the same pragmatic approach.
Rather than treating innovation and copyright protection as mutually exclusive, policymakers should seek to modernize the law while preserving incentives for creativity. There is no reason to believe the questions raised by AI are any less solvable than those posed by earlier technological revolutions.
Photography did not eliminate painting. Motion pictures did not replace books. The internet did not destroy entertainment. Instead, it has made more creative content available to more people than ever before.
AI will reshape the creative economy in ways we cannot yet foresee. We should neither fear nor ignore those changes, and ensure that content creators continue to receive appropriate legal protections and compensation for their work.
Copyright law will need to adapt to the new terrain, as it has in response to previous technologies and the novel questions they posed. The priority must remain protecting creative works and ensuring that creators are fairly compensated.
History suggests that technological progress expands opportunities for human creativity rather than diminishing them.
The challenge is not choosing between innovation and copyright protection; it is ensuring that both evolve together.
• Matt Sandgren is the executive director of the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation and works at the intersection of public policy, law and government affairs. He served for 15 years on Capitol Hill, including as senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and as Sen. Orrin G. Hatch’s chief of staff.
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