During a later visit to a Picasso exhibit in Milan, I got here across a famous informational diagram by the art historian Alfred Barr, mapping how modernist movements like Cubism evolved from earlier artistic traditions. Picasso is usually held up as one in every of modern art’s most original and influential figures, but Barr’s chart made plain the various artists he drew from—Goya, El Greco, Cézanne, African sculptors. This made me wonder: If a generative AI model had been fed all those inputs, might it have produced Cubism? Could it have generated the subsequent great artistic “breakthrough”?
These experiences—spread across three cities and centered on three iconic artists—coalesced right into a broader reflection I’d already begun. I had recently spoken with Daniel Ek, the founding father of Spotify, about how restrictive copyright laws are in music. Song arrangements and lyrics enjoy longer protection than many pharmaceutical patents. Ek sits at the forefront of this debate, and he observed that generative AI already produces an astonishing range of music. A few of it is sweet. Much of it’s terrible. But nearly all of it borrows from the patterns and structures of existing work.
Musicians already routinely sue each other for borrowing from previous works. How will the law adapt to a type of artistry that’s driven by prompts and precedent, built entirely on a corpus of existing material?
And the questions don’t stop there. Who, exactly, owns the outputs of a generative model? The user who crafted the prompt? The developer who built the model? The artists whose works were ingested to coach it? Will the social forces that shape artistic standing—critics, curators, tastemakers—still hold sway? Or will a brand new, AI-era hierarchy emerge? If every artist has at all times borrowed from others, is AI’s generative recombination really so different? And in such a litigious culture, how long can copyright law hold its current form? The US Copyright Office has begun to tackle the thorny problems with ownership and says that generative outputs could be copyrighted in the event that they are sufficiently human-authored. However it is playing catch-up in a rapidly evolving field.
Different industries are responding in other ways. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently announced that filmmakers’ use of generative AI wouldn’t disqualify them from Oscar contention—and that they wouldn’t be required to reveal once they’d used the technology. Several acclaimed movies, including Oscar winner , incorporated AI into their production processes.
The music world, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its definitions of originality. Consider the recent lawsuit against Ed Sheeran. In 2016, he was sued by the heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” who claimed that Sheeran’s “Pondering Out Loud” copied the sooner song’s melody, harmony, and rhythm. When the case finally went to trial in 2023, Sheeran brought a guitar to the stand. He played the disputed four-chord progression—I–iii–IV–V—and wove together a mash-up of songs built on the identical foundation. The purpose was clear: These are the basic units of songwriting. After a transient deliberation, the jury found Sheeran not liable.
Reflecting after the trial, Sheeran said: “These chords are common constructing blocks … Nobody owns them or the best way they’re played, in the identical way nobody owns the color blue.”
