Over 20 major news publishers like NewsCorp, the Associated Press, and Vox Media have rushed to sign deals with OpenAI, with Vox calling it a "strategic content and product partnership."
The stakes?
OpenAI is offering between $1-5 million per year to license copyrighted content, with News Corp potentially securing $250 million over five years.
But this isn't just about big media companies protecting their turf – it's about the future of human creativity itself.
The Copyright 2-Step: Who wrote it (author), and who owns it?
When a photographer named Napoleon Sarony went to court in 1884 over a photo of Oscar Wilde, the simple question: could you copyright a photograph when a machine – the camera – did the actual capturing?
The courts said yes, because the photographer made creative choices. The camera was just a tool.

Fast forward to today. I took those same historic photos into Midjourney and asked for exact replicas. The result? The AI turned something unique into something average.
That's not just a technical failure – it's a warning about what happens when we reduce creativity to "content."
Tying old Laws to New Ways - AI Case law simply isn’t relevant
Both the US and EU are wrestling with a fundamental question: what constitutes "sufficient human authorship" in the age of AI?
The US Copyright Office's rejection of copyright for the AI-generated graphic novel "Zarya of the Dawn" highlights this challenge.
While a human arranged the AI-generated images, the Office deemed the images themselves ineligible for protection.
Meanwhile, the EU's approach, with its focus on human intellectual effort, raises its own questions.
How do we determine ownership when AI assists in creation?
Could specific provisions for AI-generated works differ from traditional copyright rules?
"The edge cases are where creativity begins. That's where the really new change, things that people don't first get, comes from."
Jason Allen won an award but couldn’t get a copyright because he used AI. With over 600 prompts, detailed editing after that, since AI was involved, no copyright.
"Remember that spectrum of human involvement we talked about? The courts say you need 'sufficient human authorship' - but what does that actually mean when you're working with AI?
On April 9, 2024, Representative Adam Schiff brought The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act to the House floor – a bill that would require developers of generative AI technologies to identify the material they have used to train their systems.
Think about Sarah Andersen and her fellow artists. Their entire portfolios - decades of work - were used to train AI without anyone asking.
Now big publishers like Axios are getting paid for their content through partnerships, while individual creators are left wondering: 'Hey, what about us?'
Schiff’s Act is under the illusion that it’s simply a request to find out what’s been put in, and then identifying ways to extract it which is borderline sad perception of how this works.
The copyright world doesn’t recognize AI as anything, not even officially a tool, and we’re spending our time trying to prove there’s more to copyright than humans, or human intelligence.
The "Human Authorship" Hurdle: US copyright law requires human authorship. No idea what to do when AI tools are heavily involved in the creative process.
Case in Point: The Copyright Office's rejection of copyright for the AI-generated graphic novel "Zarya of the Dawn" highlights this issue. While a human arranged the AI-generated images, the Office deemed the images themselves ineligible for protection.
Defining "Sufficiently Creative" Human Input: How much human input is needed to transform AI-generated content into a copyrightable work? There's no clear answer.
Gray Area: If a user provides detailed prompts and iteratively refines AI output, is that enough to claim authorship? What if they use AI to generate variations and select their favorite?
Jason Allen, a Colorado artist, won first place in the digital arts category at the Colorado State Fair in 2022 with his AI-generated artwork titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.”
Potential Solutions:
Thresholds of Originality: Establishing guidelines on the level of human creativity required for copyright protection in AI-assisted works.
"Human-AI Collaboration" Category: Creating a new category of copyright for works where humans and AI contribute significantly, with ownership shared or determined by specific rules.
Time is the hidden factor here. These creators spent years perfecting their craft, building their portfolios, engaging their communities. Meanwhile, AI can generate similar-looking work in seconds.
But here's the fascinating part - those quick AI generations? They're built on the backs of all that human time and creativity. The publishers figured this out first - that's why they're getting paid. Eighteen major deals and counting.
But what about Mumsnet's community members? What about indie creators? What about you? When you collaborate with AI, you're not just investing your current time - you're building on everyone else's past work too. So how do we make this fair for everyone?"
Three Paths Forward
1. Shakespeare in Code
King Lear wasn't performed much until the 1800s – two hundred years after it was written. It was noise back then, until it broke through later.
Society doesn’t always understand what’s really good quickly, and in AI those are called edge cases. If we bury the world in what’s probable, we miss what’s on the edge.
Use influence vectors to find what’s often underneath the gaze of the public, and let that edge influence change in ways it does in human life, profoundly.
Incentivize the edge, pay them to create and invent and make your LLMs smarter. It won’t take an engineer’s salary, and performance driven content should be rewarded in pay, use of technology, and compute credits.
2. The Open Canvas Approach
Human creativity is open source. Instead of the "delay, bluff, and pay" strategy we're seeing with big publishers, imagine a creative ecosystem where contribution means compensation – not just in money, but in access, technology, and opportunity.
Make it like the Axios-OpenAI deal: use of technology in exchange for permission to ingest and reference content.
Plug a culture into AI, creativity arises. Don’t try to tamp it down with lawyers.
3. Think Different, Not Like Me
"We're building AI from what's already popular, processed, proven. And we're risking missing what's coming, what we're inventing, what nobody even gets except somebody who's very young and they see things that you and I don't understand."
And like every other social network, with enough volume of activity, there’s a reward, maybe a payment, maybe a discount on using AI tools.
Grant and scholarship programs to reward human ingenuity that only makes models smarter.
Algos may amplify sameness, AI needs to watch for the subtle differences, the tones that drive humanity. It’s not just about being the smartest, it’s about being aware together.
Like open source, the shared knowledge is developed into something better, with human effort.
Because without human effort, at least in the short term, you’re not going to get great things out of AI.
The Human Stakes
This isn't about creators versus engineers – it's about human creativity itself. The same AI systems training on artists' work are learning from countless GitHub repositories, turning years of engineering expertise into automated code completion.
Entry-level programmers and mid-career developers are facing the same questions as writers and artists: what happens when your craft becomes training data?
And where is all the new engineering talent going to learn if there are no entry or mid-level jobs?
No one's asking for special treatment. Engineers who built vibrant open-source communities, artists who shared work under Creative Commons – they didn't expect to get rich.
They expected respect, permission, attribution – the basic dignity of choice.
The Creative Edge
The truth about creativity: if you don't encourage the edge – the people on the fringe who don't see, don't do, don't act like everyone else – to express themselves, you lose more than just their voice.
You lose the edge itself.
You lose what shows us what could be, not just what was or what's popular now.
Even in a world of endless content, Netflix still needs that one wildly different show that breaks all the rules.
Because that's where the new comes from. That's where we learn what's possible.
While AI frees up time, defining what we'll all do with this time is more important than ever.
For the few who choose to be creative, it's crucial to nourish and nurture, not simply take what they create without reward.
Think AI's amazing?
There's someone out there young and seeing things differently who will open our eyes and hearts, and that experience will make AI even more intelligent...maybe even emotionally intelligent.
The edge isn't just a boundary – it's the frontier of human creativity. And once you lose it, no amount of AI can bring it back.
Do you really want 2025 on repeat, or are you ready to build something we haven't even imagined yet?
Share this post