Who gets paid - the chicken or the egg?

Chesterman, S. (2025). Good models borrow, great models steal: Intellectual property rights and generative AI. Policy and Society, 44(1), 23–37. https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puae006


My siblings and I have an ongoing argument about the legitimacy of someone who creates a wildly popular song using AI.  Should they be able to earn a Grammy nomination as a ‘recording artist’? What about ‘producer/arranger’? 

Simon Chesterman’s article discusses this dilemma.  He clarifies that the argument about generative AI isn’t whether it’s capable of being impressive.  The bigger issue is whether we are being honest about what made it impressive in the first place.  

Generative AI doesn’t create from nothing. It is trained by massive amounts of human-created work. This work includes books, articles, images, code, and any other form of expertise. So here begs the question:  If human work was used to train the system, who should receive credit for its ‘creations’?  The article goes deeper by questioning whether the humans who created the original work or source material should receive compensation or some type of copyright protection.  

From my operations background, I compare this situation to a vendor secretly copying years of a company’s internal training manuals and leadership materials.  The vendor then packages and sells this work as a ‘new’ management system.  I’m sure there would be hard questions asked about where the material came from, who authorized its release, and who should profit from it.     

This debate of ownership and fairness is only one of many important points in this article and I recommend the read.  I only zeroed in on this aspect because of my ongoing sibling debate.  

What are your thoughts?  

More to come from this article!


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