Pride of Authorship

The other day, I Googled something and the top result was an AI summary, part of which read a lot like something I wrote several years ago. To the AI's credit, there were several source links provided, and I'm sure that whatever it "borrowed" came from one of those pieces. I didn't bother to check. Maybe I was quoted within someone else's work, maybe someone just happened to phrase an idea in a way very similar to the way I phrased it (it happens), but those were my thoughts expressed in my words.

I've been publishing on the internet for 17 years. I've come across my own words quoted in all kinds of places, usually with a proper credit. I quote people, with proper credit, all the time on this blog. And it's not just writers. On Tuesday, I used a photo of Auguste Rodin's statue "The Thinker" to illustrate my post . . . with proper credit.

Ever since the so-called British Statute of Anne became law in 1710, the first copyright law, we've legally recognized an author's right of ownership to their own work. Other works of creative output have been added to copyright law over the decades, right up to this day as new creative forms emerge.

My point is that for most of human history, when we created something we didn't expect that the product of our intellectual-creative work belonged to us. History's most celebrated artists and thinkers -- Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Plato -- didn't own the exclusive rights of anything they produced. Once it was out there, it belonged to everyone, a gift to the world.

In his book Devine Fury: The History of Genius, historian Darrin McMahon writes, "The medieval dictum that God alone can create . . . resonated in the minds of theorists and practitioners alike, who regarded all art and thought as in large measure an act of recovery and imitation, a re-creation of what God in his perfection had already conceived." In other words, we didn't give human beings credit for the thinking and creating. It was all the work of the Devine and we were the tools used to bring it into the world. To assert ownership would be to blaspheme. 

Up until the emergence of the idea of copyright there was little or no pride in authorship. Indeed, many of our earliest books were handwritten copies of copies of copies. Once you owned your own copy, you could then earn your keep by dictating it to others so that they could "write" their own copy to dictate to others and so on, a practice largely carried on by literate monks. The original author's names are unknown because they were irrelevant. Art, in all its forms, wasn't so much about originality as it was creating imitations of what came before. I'm no art expert, but when I spend time with ancient indigenous art from any culture, I'm struck by the idea that what I'm looking at are endless variations on the same themes, as if the goal was not something new, but something more perfect. And since perfection is the exclusive realm of the gods, it would have been gross hubris to sign any finished work.

The printing press, followed by copyright laws, changed all that. Now "(w)riters and artists strove to define unique personalities and styles in order to highlight claims to the ownership of their creations. Originality and copyright developed in tandem, and the new creator of "genius" dramatized the emergence of the modern artist and self."

I imagine that this is one of the key, unintended changes that the advent of AI will ultimately bring with it, a return to a time where there is less pride in authorship. We will still have "celebrity" creators, of course, people like Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Plato who knew how to self-promote, but we're already seeing most creative output being lumped together under the label "content." Screenwriters, actors, and other Hollywood creatives are currently in a fight for their creative lives as their work, and even their voices and likenesses, are on the verge of being sucked into this cloud of content that are owned by corporations. Works of "art" are already being created by machines, cobbled together by the new, and far less perfect, "god" of AI. The fight in favor of copyright may be a long one, but if I were a gambling man, my money is on AI.

As a person who has always admired the unique creative genius in others, those artists and thinkers who produce works that are unlike anything I've ever before experienced, and who hopes, in his small way to contribute something new to the world, I don't like it at all. At the same time, if I try to imagine a world in which we've all set aside our possessiveness about our own creations, I can also see a kind of beauty in it.

Every day, in preschool classrooms around the world, children are making art, then handing it to someone, saying, "This is for you." I could hardly have saved all of these gifts of creative expression that I received over my decades in the classroom, although I do have a file folder where I keep a few special ones. I remember those artists, but they long ago forgot about the art, probably within minutes of handing it to me.

Copyright is a legal concept, not a natural one. If we adults weren't there urging them to sign their artwork, or signing it on their behalf, most young children, most of the time, wouldn't care what happened to their creative genius once they released it into the world. Of course, parents teach them that their work has a certain kind of value when we stick it on the door of the fridge, but that's different than ownership, it's evidence that the creative gifts we've given to loved ones are appreciated.

I have no illusions about the wider world, but I like knowing that preschool is a place where creativity, even genius, is not commodified, but rather sent out in the world as a gift.

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