THE LONG VIEW

It began not with code, but with clay: the first known copyright dispute was inscribed on a Mesopotamian tablet in 2100 BCE, where a scribe named Nanni complained that another had copied his father’s work without credit—a plea etched in cuneiform, one of humanity’s earliest records of creative ownership. Fast forward four millennia, and we find ourselves in a strangely familiar courtroom drama, where judges pore over AI outputs, asking not 'was it copied?' but 'could it exist without?'. The thread connecting these moments is not law, but pattern: whenever a technology emerges that can replicate the essence of a creator’s voice—be it the printing press, the camera, or the neural network—society must confront a haunting question: is originality defined by the work itself, or by the shadow it casts in the machine? In the 1710 Statute of Anne, the British Parliament sought to balance public access with authorial incentive, unaware that they were setting a precedent for algorithmic training data debates. When Edison’s kinetoscope threatened live theater, critics feared the death of performance—yet out of that tension came cinema, a new art form born of the very technology that was supposed to destroy the old. Now, as AI generates poetry in the voice of Sylvia Plath or paintings in the manner of Frida Kahlo, we stand at the same precipice: not of theft, but of transformation. The real question is not whether AI should be allowed to learn from artists, but whether we are prepared to accept that every great tool of reproduction does not steal culture—it reanimates it, in ways we cannot yet foresee. And just as the scribe Nanni could not imagine Wikipedia, we cannot imagine the new forms of authorship that will emerge once we stop policing the past and start designing for the future [1][2][3]. —Dr. Raymond Wong Chi-Ming