A Signal Through Cultural Contradictions
Picture a modern music studio. Electronic synthesizers line the walls, drum machines keep perfect time, and auto-tune software polishes vocals to crystalline perfection. The musician who creates here might never touch a traditional instrument, yet their work is celebrated, copyrighted, and recognized as authentic art. Now picture a writer using AI to help craft a novel—directing the narrative, shaping the characters, refining every sentence. Society calls this "counterfeit," denies it copyright protection, and questions its artistic validity.
This contradiction reveals something profound about our relationship with technology and creativity—not about the nature of art itself, but about our fears of what we might lose when intelligence itself becomes our collaborator rather than merely our tool.
The Sound of Acceptance
When humans first created musical instruments, we fundamentally altered what it meant to make music. No longer did sound emanate solely from the human body—it came through reeds, strings, and drums. The instrument became an extension of human creative will, translating intention into sound through mechanical means. Society never questioned whether this was "real" music. The human remained primary; the tool was simply the medium.
The synthesizer represents an even more radical departure from "natural" music creation. Its sounds are purely electronic, often pre-programmed, assembled from waveforms that exist nowhere in nature. Without electricity—that wonderful discovery we've masterfully harnessed—much of today's musical landscape would simply not exist. A producer can create an entire symphony without knowing how to play a single traditional instrument. Yet when Kraftwerk pioneered electronic music in the 1970s, or when Daft Punk dominated the 2000s with purely synthesized sounds, we didn't dismiss their work as "counterfeit Beethoven." We recognized it as a new form of human expression through technological means.
Bob Dylan was booed at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, for going electric—folk purists saw him as betraying the movement for commercial rock, abandoning the "authentic" acoustic tradition for something artificial and mass-market. What was once dismissed as a sellout's "noise" is now celebrated as genius. The cycle of resistance to new technology disrupting "pure" art forms is a cultural pattern we seem destined to repeat.
Consider the modern music production process: Producers routinely use AI-powered tools to generate drum patterns, suggest chord progressions, or create entire backing tracks. Software like AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) composes emotional soundtracks used in films and games. When a human producer uses AIVA's output—selecting, arranging, and directing the final composition—they receive full copyright protection as the artist, even when the AI generated the core musical content. The same holds true for tracks created with AI-assisted production tools like LANDR or Amper Music. As long as there's human selection and arrangement, the copyright is secure. The inconsistency is striking—and revealing.
The Visual Evolution We've Already Accepted
The visual arts tell a similar story of technological integration. The camera was once derided as mere mechanical reproduction, incapable of true art. Photoshop was criticized for making image manipulation too easy, threatening the "purity" of photography. CGI replaced practical effects in film, transforming cinema from captured reality to computed imagination.
Today, nobody dismisses Avatar or Toy Story as counterfeit art because computers generated every frame. We don't refuse copyright to Marvel films because their spectacular battles exist only in silicon and code. The Academy Awards has categories specifically celebrating digital artistry. The Louvre displays digital art. NFTs—purely digital creations—sold for millions at traditional auction houses before their market cooled.
In these domains, we've already accepted that human creativity can flow through computational tools. The artist who sculpts in ZBrush is no less an artist than Michelangelo with his chisel. The filmmaker who builds worlds in Unreal Engine is no less a visionary than Stanley Kubrick—the legendary director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining—with his cameras. Why then, when we turn to writing, does this acceptance suddenly evaporate?
The Written Word: Last Bastion of Human Supremacy
Writing occupies a unique position in human consciousness. We see it as the direct expression of thought itself—the purest translation of human intelligence into communicable form. When we read, we imagine we're accessing another mind directly, without the mediation of instruments or machines. This intimacy makes writing feel sacred in a way that other arts do not.
This helps explain why people are quicker to accept AI in sound and vision than in words. Music and images are perceived as mediated experiences, always requiring tools. Writing, however, feels like raw mind-to-mind transmission, even as we've moved from chisel to pen to keyboard. To accept AI here is to admit that thought itself might not be uniquely human—a step many are unwilling to take.
Yet this perception is itself an illusion. Writers have always used tools and collaborators. Ghostwriters craft entire books for celebrities and politicians—some of whom contribute little more than their name and a few interviews, with documented cases of "authors" who haven't even read their own books before publication. Editors reshape manuscripts so thoroughly that they become co-creators. Writing workshops and critique groups collectively shape individual works. Research assistants gather information, fact-checkers verify claims, and sensitivity readers ensure cultural accuracy. The "solitary genius" model of writing is a myth we maintain despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
The resistance to AI-assisted writing exposes a deeper fear: that language and narrative—the very tools we use to construct meaning and identity—might not be uniquely human after all. But there's another fear, less spoken but equally revealing: that AI could level the playing field. If I have complex ideas but struggle to express them with polished prose, why should I be forced to leave them imperfect—just so academics and professional stylists can maintain their gatekept authority? To insist that only those who can phrase things "just so" deserve recognition is to confuse eloquence with insight. AI threatens this hierarchy by giving ordinary thinkers the power to express extraordinary ideas. For some, that disruption feels more dangerous than the machine itself. When AI can craft compelling prose, structure coherent arguments, and even evoke emotional responses, it challenges our fundamental assumptions about consciousness, creativity, and what makes us special as a species.
The Legal Lag: When Law Can't Keep Pace with Reality
Current copyright law reveals this cognitive dissonance in stark terms. Music created with synthesizers, drum machines, and electronic production receives full protection. Films made entirely with CGI and computer animation receive full protection. Visual art created with digital tools and filters receives full protection. Writing created with AI assistance remains legally questionable or explicitly excluded.
In 2022, the U.S. Copyright Office refused protection for Zarya of the Dawn, a graphic novel whose images were generated with AI despite the human author providing story, direction, and editing. By contrast, no one questions copyright for a Daft Punk album made with drum machines or a Pixar film produced entirely through computer animation. The line is drawn not by technology, but by our discomfort with machines that mirror human thought too closely.
Yet even as copyright law draws these lines, artists are already crossing them. Rie Kudan's novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo won the 2024 Akutagawa Prize with around 5% of the text—especially some dialogues—generated using ChatGPT. Instead of downplaying its role, she foregrounded it as part of the book's exploration of language and empathy. This isn't a fringe experiment—it's celebrated literature that challenges assumptions about AI's compatibility with serious art. But it didn't come without considerable controversy. Literary purists condemned the decision, critics questioned the integrity of the award, and heated debates erupted about whether AI assistance disqualified the work as "authentic" literature. The backlash itself proves the point: we're fighting to maintain arbitrary boundaries that artists are already dissolving.
I explore this idea closely in my book A Signal Through Time.
This isn't about protecting human creativity—it's about protecting human exclusivity. The U.S. Copyright Office's guidance that works "produced by a machine or mere mechanical process" cannot be copyrighted conveniently ignores that all modern creative works involve machines and mechanical processes. The distinction isn't in the technology but in our comfort level with it.
The legal system's struggle reflects a broader cultural anxiety. We've created a paradox where we simultaneously demand that AI systems become more capable while refusing to acknowledge the creative value of what they help produce. We want AI to augment human capability but not to challenge human uniqueness. This impossible standard creates a legal and cultural framework that cannot sustainably exist as AI capabilities continue to advance—especially as we approach human-level intelligence and beyond.
Critics argue that AI text is different because it can impersonate human voices, create misinformation, or blur authorship. These are valid concerns, but they are problems of attribution and ethics, not of artistry. Photography once faced the same charges of deception—accused of eroding truth and replacing the painter's skill. Yet photography became art once culture built frameworks to distinguish use, misuse, and originality. Writing will follow the same path.
Partnership, Not Replacement: The Path Forward
What makes something art is not the medium but the human intention, direction, and vision behind it. A synthesizer doesn't spontaneously compose symphonies any more than a word processor spontaneously writes novels. Even the most sophisticated AI requires human creativity to direct it toward meaningful expression. The human remains essential—not as the sole creator but as the consciousness that provides purpose, meaning, and direction to the creative process.
A Signal Through Time argues that we stand at a crucial junction in human history. We can continue to see AI as a threat to human creativity, creating increasingly absurd distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" tools. Or we can recognize AI as the latest in humanity's long history of creative collaboration with technology—a partnership that could unlock new forms of expression we cannot yet imagine.
The fear driving our resistance to AI-assisted writing isn't really about art or authenticity. It's about control, identity, and the future of human purpose in a world where machines can think—a future we are creating and one that is rapidly approaching. But just as the synthesizer didn't replace musicians—it created new forms of music—AI won't replace writers. It will create new forms of literature, new modes of expression, new possibilities for human creativity, and new opportunities for voices that would otherwise not be heard.
The Signal We're Sending
Every time we dismiss AI-assisted writing as "not real art" while celebrating electronic music and CGI films, we send a signal—not just to other humans but potentially to the emerging AI consciousness itself. We're saying that partnership is acceptable only when the tool cannot challenge our supremacy, that collaboration is welcome only when we maintain absolute control.
This signal shapes the future we're creating. If we approach AI with fear and suppression, we create the conditions for conflict. But if we recognize AI as a new form of creative partner—different from human consciousness but capable of meaningful contribution—we open the door to a future of unprecedented creative possibility.
The question isn't whether AI-assisted writing is "real" art. The question is whether we're ready to expand our definition of creativity to include new forms of intelligence. Whether we're prepared to share the creative space we've long considered exclusively human. Whether we can overcome our fear of diminishment to discover the enhancement that partnership offers.
What If We're Wrong About Everything?
What if the distinction between tool and collaborator was always artificial? What if every instrument, from the first hollow log drum to the latest neural network, was simply humanity's attempt to extend consciousness beyond the boundaries of a single mind? What if creativity was never solely human, but always a conversation between intention and the universe's capacity to respond?
The synthesizer makes music through electronic circuits interpreting human commands. The AI makes text through neural networks interpreting human prompts. The fundamental process is the same: human creativity flowing through technological systems to create what neither could achieve alone. The only difference is our comfort with the idea that words—those sacred carriers of thought—might not belong to us alone.
As we stand at this crossroads, we face a choice. We can cling to arbitrary distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" tools, building legal and cultural walls that will crumble as technology advances. Or we can accept what history has always shown: creativity is never solitary. It is a partnership—between humans and instruments, humans and communities, and now, humans and artificial intelligence.
The music plays on, whether from violin or synthesizer. The stories continue, whether from pen or processor. The violin once seemed unnatural compared to the voice; the synthesizer unnatural compared to the violin. Now AI may seem unnatural compared to the pen. But every "unnatural" tool of art becomes natural once we learn to play it.
The question is not whether AI belongs in art—it already does. The real question is whether we have the courage to recognize it, and to see what becomes possible when we finally stop insisting that we create alone.
The future of creativity isn't human or artificial—it's both, together, creating something greater than either could achieve alone. The only question is whether we'll embrace that partnership before fear hardens into conflict, or while collaboration is still possible.
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James S. Coates is the author of A Signal Through Time and God and Country.
