Civilization
AI and Intellectual Property
November 2023 · Naples
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the creative economy with a force comparable to the printing press or the industrial revolution — and the law has not yet caught up with what it means for authorship and copyright.
AI is transforming the creative economy as profoundly as earlier technological revolutions transformed the transmission of culture and the means of production. The central questions concern intellectual property and copyright: what happens to authorship, ownership and remuneration when machines participate in the creative act itself?
A regulatory framework still tilted toward producers
The European Union's AI Act represents the most comprehensive legislative attempt to date, requiring transparency from generative-AI providers about training data and copyright use. But the balance is revealing: across the text, intellectual property is referenced far more often in relation to the rights of AI manufacturers than to the rights of authors. That asymmetry is a symptom of a structural weakness — the people whose work trains these systems are, so far, the least protected by them.
Three challenges, two remedies
Three core problems emerge at the intersection of AI and creative work: unfair algorithmic competition with human creative professions; the unauthorised use of creative content to train AI systems; and market distortion as the biases embedded in training data are amplified at scale. The much-discussed "step-out" option — letting creators exclude their work from training datasets — is a necessary right but an insufficient remedy: those who opt out risk irrelevance, while those who remain are left unprotected.
Two directions point toward a fairer settlement. The first is assured attribution — using provenance systems, including blockchain-based records with robust verification, to keep authorship traceable. The second is fair remuneration through new collective models, moving from per-work licensing toward concession-based agreements negotiated by collecting bodies with the major AI producers.
This is where collecting societies must reinvent their role. Individual creators and small platforms cannot negotiate, at scale, with the largest technology companies; credible institutional counterparts can. The creative economy has weathered technological revolutions before — but only where law and institutions evolved fast enough to keep human authorship at the centre of the value it creates.