Let’s cut the noise. For the past two years, the loudest voices have been screaming about AI art, framing the debate as a zero-sum game: either it is the death of the artist, or it is a free-for-all wild west. That noise is a distraction, and we need to ignore it and get to work.
To truly understand this seismic shift, we must first understand the spirit of what it means to be an author. Now, I’m no lawyer, but I do know that the very foundation of U.S. copyright law, rooted in the Constitution, has one singular purpose: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” This is not about giving a creator a life-long monopoly. It is a social contract. For a limited time, the creator is given exclusive control over their “Writings” so they have the economic incentive to create the work in the first place. When that limited time expires, the work enters the Public Domain. This Public Domain is the engine of progress, the public square where every new creator can freely take the foundations of the past and build the future. This entire system, from its 1790 origin, is fundamentally designed to put a premium on human authorship and to keep the creative wheels turning. The challenge of AI is not that it creates, but how we use it so it does not obscure the identity of the author.
Let’s take some time to understand the machine, from noise to prediction.
Before we panic about AI replacing our jobs, let us look at how the latest text-to-image models actually work. Forget the idea of a digital painter channeling creativity. It is indeed true that this isn’t what’s happening. Imagine, instead, a massive library of every image, every film frame, and every style ever uploaded to the internet. The AI, known as a diffusion model, doesn’t store it all and then use it to bash together images. That would take an impossible amount of hard drive space and computing power. Instead, it is trained by taking a clean image and systematically breaking it down by adding pure, random noise. The AI’s only task is to then learn how to reverse that process, how to precisely de-noise the image back to its original state. Do that with enough images, and the program’s ability to identify and create variations of any given object or scenario becomes the potential for limitless new ones.
“The challenge of AI is not that it creates, but how we use it so it does not obscure the identity of the author.”
When you type a prompt, say, “Epic Dystopian Metropolis,” (how original, right?) you are not directing an artist. You are telling the AI to take a canvas of pure random noise and then predict what the most statistically probable image is to satisfy that text description, based on the billions of examples it was trained on. It is a genius act of statistical prediction and de-noising, but not a creative act of human choice. The algorithm is a fantastically complex calculator, but not a co-author.
The law’s clear line, right now is about transformative versus derivative.
The United States Copyright Office (USCO) has affirmed the only rule that matters to creators: only a human being can be an author. The law protects expression, not the idea or the tool used to fix that idea. A purely AI-generated image, spat out from a simple text prompt, has no human expressive input and is therefore uncopyrightable. It is a statistical output, not an original work of authorship. In that way, it is legally worthless, but so what?
This clarity forces us to think beyond the simple derivative work. A derivative work, like a film adaptation of a novel, is an adaptation that requires the original author’s permission because its creative value is tied directly to the original work. Not that any work can be pinpointed in the creation of an AI image, unless the prompter specifically requests an IP be incorporated into the image requested. However, that is neither here nor there.
A truly successful work using AI must be transformative. A transformative work is a completely new creation that uses the source material, the AI output, in a fundamentally different context, often imbuing it with a new meaning or message. The film you cut, the story you write, the final design you meticulously composite using AI-generated textures and concept art: that is the transformative human choice.
But there is a corporate misdirection, because AI can go far beyond just imagery.
The intense public focus on whether a raw AI image is copyrightable is not just an academic debate; it is a profound corporate misdirection. By forcing the conversation to revolve only around simple image and video generation, they encourage the public and independent creators to see AI as a creative dead end or a tool for plagiarism, ensuring that any use of it is met with shaming and hostility.
“A purely AI-generated image… is legally worthless, but so what?”
The reality is that AI is a tool that spans your entire creative kit, far beyond the initial image generation. It is the code completion tool that lets you build your website, the large language model that helps you draft your legal contracts and budgets, the audio tool that lets you master your film’s sound, and the animation tool that assists with rigging your characters, giving it more depth, lighting it, and blending key-frames. By dismissing AI only as an image generator, independent creators risk overlooking essential breakthroughs that could cut their production time and budget by orders of magnitude. Do not let the debate over a raw image output blind you to the dozens of other practical AI assistants that can empower your entire workflow.
What is the corporate threat and the open-source fight?
This is where the future of the independent creator truly hangs in the balance. While the USCO has established the human spark as the source of copyright, the primary threat now comes from the possibility of monopoly.
Major corporations, often aligning with the closed-source AI companies, are investing billions. Their goal is clear: they want to control the most powerful, most capable models, lock them behind expensive corporate subscriptions, and potentially use their sheer market power to drive up the cost of entry for everyone else. Today, AI is accessible and cheap. Tomorrow, we could see a system where only the major studios can afford the high-end, proprietary AI tools necessary to compete. They would be raising the gate on the Public Domain’s greatest new tool. The irony of this is that they are using hyperbole around AI to fuel the anti-AI crowd, having them rabidly attack small competitors for using it, while they proceed safely behind closed doors.
“Major corporations… want to control the most powerful, most capable models, lock them behind expensive corporate subscriptions.”
This is precisely why we must champion the open-source AI community. The work of creators distributing their models and tools freely is our bulwark against corporate control. These decentralized communities are keeping the technology affordable, flexible, and entirely in the hands of the artist. The power of the open-source movement lies in its commitment to the original spirit of copyright: Progress for all.
This is why you need to pick up these tools and learn them, while you can.
The lesson is simple and urgent. You have a window of opportunity right now where the tools are democratized and accessible. The time to experiment, to master, and to fully integrate these AI tools into your creative pipeline is not tomorrow, but today.
If you are the one making the final, expressive choices, if you are the one selecting, modifying, and weaving the assets into your narrative, your final film or work is protected. The sheer volume of raw, uncopyrightable AI “slop” will be irrelevant. The final, protected masterpiece will not be the one written by an algorithm, but the one directed by a vision, edited by a human hand, and stamped with the unmistakable signature of a true author.
Final Pro Tip: Document everything! Every original sketch, every human modification, every note on your script. Your paper trail is your legal armor. Get to work, keep the human spark visible, and claim your piece of the future before the gates go up.
Christopher Moonlight is an animator, special effects artist, and the director of the ‘Award This’ winning movie, The Quantum Terror. His upcoming animated sci-fi adventure, Escape From Planet Omega-12, combines traditional film-making special effects with AI to create something never seen before in independent film. You can follow the behind-the-scenes, including tutorials, tips, and tricks, on his YouTube Channel and Substack.
