Who Owns the Intelligence We Built Together?
Should AI credit those who created it.
As a longtime author, columnist, and copywriter, the US Supreme Court’s silence on AI copyright protection was deafening.
When the court recently declined to weigh in on whether AI-generated works deserve copyright protection, most commentators focused on the narrow legal outcome. But they missed the real story.
This debate was never about machines and authorship. It was always about the creative class. Writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and designers whose life’s work quietly became the raw material for the most powerful creative tools ever built. Nobody asked them, compensated them, or even told them.
If AI was built on the accumulated creative output of humanity, then who should benefit from what that intelligence generates? That’s not a legal question. It speaks to the heart of civilization.
We’ve navigated technological disruption before. The internet was meant to democratize opportunity and ended up centralizing power.
The difference today is speed. This isn’t unfolding over decades. It’s happening in real time, across every creative sector. And the creative class now faces the most profound economic reckoning of the generative AI age, not because their work has lost value, but because the system wasn’t designed to account for them.
AI systems have been commercially built on human creativity without the consent, knowledge, or compensation of the people who created them. That’s not a sustainable foundation for an industry that wants to earn trust. And trust, as purpose-driven leaders know, is the only foundation that lasts.
Companies building AI have made an implicit bargain they’ve never made explicit: we will use the culture humans created to build systems that now compete with human creators. The most forward-thinking leaders are beginning to reckon with this through licensing frameworks and revenue-sharing. Early, imperfect steps, but the right shift from extraction to reciprocity.
Human creativity is not a raw material to be mined. It’s the source of meaning, culture, and connection that makes any of this worth building. An AI ecosystem trained on human expression but designed to replace it is hollowing out the very cultural ecosystem it depends on.
A fair creative economy starts with transparency. Creators deserve to know if their work trained a commercial system. It requires compensation models that reflect ongoing value. And it demands a commitment from every business leader: invest in human creativity, don’t simply automate past it.
The companies with the most power at this moment were built on the intelligence of humanity. They have both the means and the responsibility to ensure humanity shares in what they’ve built.
Technology has always had the potential to elevate or diminish the human spirit. Which direction it goes has never been an accident, and right now, it’s our choice to make.
