Who owns what the AI writes for you?

In 2023, a graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn became a test case.

The artist had written the story and arranged the pages. The images were generated by Midjourney. The U.S. Copyright Office granted copyright on the text and the arrangement, and refused it on the images themselves. Because, it said, a human hadn't made them.

That's the line. And it's older than it looks.

What's the pattern?

In 1884, the Supreme Court had to decide whether a photograph of Oscar Wilde could be copyrighted. The argument against was that a camera is a machine. The machine made the image, not the person.

The court disagreed. The photographer chose the pose, the lighting, the arrangement. The camera was a tool. The author was the human who used it with intent.

Every new creative machine reopens that question. The player piano. The sampler. Now the language model. And the answer keeps landing in the same place: what matters is how much of the choosing a human did.

That's why this is a question about process, not technology. If you typed one prompt and published what came out, you probably own nothing. If you shaped it, selected, rewrote, and arranged, you own the shaping. Which is also, not coincidentally, the part worth owning.

What should leaders do now?

So, three things.

Keep a record of the human work. Prompts, edits, decisions. If you ever need to prove authorship, the process is the evidence.

Don't build a business on output you can't own. If your product is purely generated, anyone can copy it, and the law says they can.

And treat the human contribution as the asset. It's what the law protects, what customers will pay for, and what your competitors can't generate.

The camera didn't end authorship. It made us say what authorship is. AI is doing the same. The answer is still: the person who chose.

How much of what your company published this year could you actually claim?

Related: Can AI be creative?

Sam Rad, The Change Futurist. Keynote speaker on change, transformation, resilience, and AI adoption. Author of Radical Next. Book a keynote