A colleague sent me a link the other day. A lawyer, like me.
“Listen to this,” he wrote. “Look at what I’ve done. Look at how I sing. Listen to the arrangement.” Then he called, overflowing with excitement, to make sure I had listened.
I listened. Every time, a light bulb went on in my head. And every time, together with the light bulb, a stab.
I, I, I. Look at what I. Have. Done.
I love him. But he can’t put two notes together on a piano. The song, the arrangement, the whole thing came out of a very well-known AI platform.
This one is personal, so let me say where I stand. I don’t play many live gigs these days. That doesn’t mean I can’t. Put me on a stage, give me a guitar, and whoever comes after me should be afraid to follow. That’s my rule in public speaking, and it’s my rule with a guitar in my hands.
So my artist side, the irrational one, reacted first. It was something like: what the hell is going on here?
The funny part is that I know this world well. I play with AI tools all day and teach AI for business. I’m no technophobe: I was playing with Google’s AI Studio before most people had heard of it. I should be the last person surprised by a song made by a machine.
And still.
Karaoke had already done its damage. It wiped out a generation of players and convinced everyone they could sing. AI music platforms are karaoke on steroids. They let you sing, and they make you sing well. Good voice, decent arrangement, clean mix. Soulless, maybe. But it sounds real. And there’s a name on the cover that has very little to do with what you hear.
Then the ego left the room and the lawyer walked in. Now it was a copyright question, the one all of us have been wrestling with for years. Who is the author?
There is an old way of reading this. Europe grew up with Romanticism and the myth of the genius: the solitary author, the work as a piece of his soul. China grew up with the Tao, where everything flows and changes and nothing truly belongs to anyone. No wonder the two see plagiarism, stealing and counterfeiting so differently.
For centuries, Chinese painters and calligraphers learned by copying the masters, and a good copy was a way of honouring them. Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher who taught at the Berlin University of the Arts, wrote a short book about this attitude, Shanzhai. The word literally means “mountain stronghold”, the hideout of the outlaws in the classic novel Water Margin. In the 2000s it became the name for counterfeit phones, often as good as the originals, and then spread to books, politics, almost everything. Han’s point is that in Chinese thought the original is never fixed. A work lives as a process, and every copy adds a variation, a small difference. Identity, authorship and authenticity count far less than continuity.
When I listen to my colleague’s song, the Tao is winning.
Still, despite my love for the Tao, when it comes to copyright I have always leaned toward personality theory. It’s the idea, very European, with Kant and Hegel behind it, that a work is an extension of the person who made it. That’s why moral rights exist. That’s why your name stays attached to your work even after you sell it. And that’s why I’m so possessive of my poems, my writing, my songs, my monologues, everything that carries a big M. The fact that I decided not to publish them is entirely irrelevant.
And of all of this is ironic, given my background. I was probably one of the few Italians who had read everything by Lawrence Lessig before landing at Harvard, and Lessig is the man who wrote Free Culture and Remix. I teach copyright under the guidance of William Fisher, one of the few true geniuses I know and one of the kindest human beings I have ever met. His essay “Theories of Intellectual Property” and his maps are the North Star when I teach the course. Welfare theory, labour theory, personality theory, culture theory. My head knows all of them. My gut still signs with a big M.
Truth is, personality theory is fading. Culture can be remixed, and today it gets remixed at industrial scale. Lessig saw the remix coming. Whether he pictured machines doing it, I’m not so sure. Even welfare theory, the Anglo-American idea that copyright exists to give people an incentive to create, will have to change under pressure from the tech companies. If nobody needs an incentive to make a song anymore, what exactly are we protecting? Take a look at this website, which tracks the lawsuits against AI companies: authors, newspapers, record labels, artists. At its latest update, in October 2026, it counted 148 AI copyright suits in the US alone. The list keeps getting longer.
Back to that stab. I feel like a journalist handed a perfectly polished article by someone who can’t write. Mostly, I’m stunned by the speed of it all. And I don’t know what will happen to art.
My guess is that artists will become antennas: people who catch what’s in the air and pass it on. Maybe Han’s China saw this coming long before the machines did. And the idea of “I” will change with them.
But if I is no longer I, who is singing? Who is playing? Who wrote the arrangement? And the question that keeps me up at night: how do artists still get paid, and still make a living?
I really don’t know.
What I do know is that I can still pick up my guitar and play something with my own fingers, and all my lovely human imperfections.
Maybe nobody will ever hear it, except me.
But it will have a big M on it.
