Everything Is Borrowed. AI Just Made Us Notice.
A few days ago I saw a post about an AI-generated song that had made its way onto the charts.
The reaction was furious.
The machine had stolen every riff. Every lick. Every vocal inflection. Every musical thought from the human artists who came before it.
And I found myself thinking about Mark Twain.
Which is probably not where most people go when discussing artificial intelligence.
In 1903, Twain wrote to Helen Keller after she had been accused of plagiarism as a child. His point, in wonderfully Twain-like fashion, was that almost all ideas are second-hand. We gather them consciously and unconsciously from a million places, mix them together with our own experiences, personalities and peculiarities, and eventually something comes out that we call ours.
That idea has always fascinated me.
Because anyone who has spent a lifetime in a creative business knows it is true.
Designers look at design.
Writers read writers.
Photographers study photographers.
Musicians listen to musicians.
Art directors have drawers, folders, bookshelves and, depending on their age, possibly several collapsing filing cabinets filled with things that made them stop and think, That’s interesting.
We call them references.
We call them inspiration.
We call them research.
We very rarely call the police.
And no, before someone begins assembling the bonfire, I am not saying that artificial intelligence and human inspiration are exactly the same thing.
They aren’t.
The scale is different. The technology is different. The commercial implications are different. And there are very legitimate questions about how AI systems were trained, whether copyrighted material should have been licensed, how creators should be compensated and what disclosure should be required.
Those conversations need to happen.
But I become uneasy when the conversation turns into:
Human creativity: pure and original.AI creativity: stolen.
Because I have met humans.
We borrow constantly.
I spent an entire career looking at advertising, typography, illustration, photography, architecture, movies, packaging and whatever else happened to cross my path. Some of it undoubtedly ended up influencing work I produced years later without my consciously knowing where it came from.
That isn’t theft.
That is having a brain.
Now we have built machines that can recognize patterns from enormous amounts of human-created material, and suddenly we’re confronting an uncomfortable question:
How much of creativity has ever been completely original?
That does not mean ownership no longer matters.
Quite the opposite.
If an AI reproduces someone’s work, impersonates a living artist, clones a singer’s voice or produces something substantially derived from protected material, we should absolutely have rules for that.
And if billion-dollar companies are making money from systems built using creators’ work, artists have every right to ask how that economic relationship should work.
In fact, maybe that is where some of the answer lies.
Instead of pretending AI can somehow be separated from all the human creativity it learned from, perhaps we should be figuring out better ways to compensate the people whose work helped teach it.
Music already has systems for royalties. They are complicated, imperfect and occasionally capable of making grown adults cry, but they exist.
So why couldn’t AI eventually have something similar?
A portion of subscription fees, licensing income or commercial use could go into royalty pools for artists whose work was part of authorized training collections. Better tracking, fingerprinting, licensing databases and attribution technology could evolve along with the AI itself.
Would it be simple?
Absolutely not.
Neither is anything involving music royalties.
But “difficult” and “impossible” are not the same word.
Maybe the answer isn’t to stop AI from learning from human creativity.
Maybe the answer is to make sure human creativity gets paid when it does.
There is another kind of AI use happening too.
I have used AI to make ridiculous songs about my four-pound dog getting groomed.
No musicians have been replaced.
No record label has collapsed.
Shanti has not yet demanded royalties.
I have used AI to explore ideas, make images, solve production problems and occasionally create something so bizarre that no reasonable human being would have volunteered to make it for me in the first place.
It is a tool.
A very powerful one.
And like nearly every powerful tool humans have invented, it can be used brilliantly, badly, ethically, lazily, deceptively or hilariously.
The tool isn’t really the interesting part.
The choices are.
Maybe Mark Twain understood this long before any of us were arguing about algorithms.
Ideas have always come from other ideas.
The challenge now is figuring out how to protect the people who create the culture without pretending that culture was ever created in isolation.
And if anyone still wants to throw rocks at me after that, please select the small ones.
I’m getting older.
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