Did we need to define music that was created with samplers and computers differently than notes humans played on an instrument?

Or was it just… music? Do we need a new definition of what it means to “write” something? There is a fascinating (and troubling) literary scandal unfolding around Quebec writer Thélyson Orélien. His debut novel, C’était ça ou mourir, became a sensation… first in Quebec and then in France. Critics loved it… readers loved it… major literary prizes took notice. Then an anonymous account ran portions of the book through an AI detector and accused Orélien of using AI to write it. And suddenly the question wasn’t whether the book was good… it was: Who wrote it? The story has become much more complicated because allegations surfaced that Orélien plagiarized portions of work published years before our AI era. That matters because plagiarism is something we understand. Taking someone else’s work and presenting it as your own violates a fairly established social and professional contract.

AI is much… messier.

It seems absurd. My good friend, Patrick Tanguay (in his wonderful Sentiers newsletter) said it best: “I’d like to draw your attention to one thing that is worth considering: ‘we’ are training LLMs on a vast swath of human creations, pushing models to write, speak, and fake-think like humans. Then ‘we’ use other LLMs to test human writing and accuse them of writing like LLMs, the models trained to sound human. We’re pressuring humans to prove they are human, because models accuse them of writing like models that are writing like humans.”

Read that again.

We’re entering a world where humans have to prove that they’re human because a machine thinks they sound too much like a machine trained to sound human. And while this is a deeply fascinating philosophical question to debate, there’s an even deeper thought lurking right behind it…

What are we buying when we buy a novel?

We’re obviously buying words… a story… characters… ideas. But I think we believe we’re buying something else too. We’re buying access to another human being’s imagination. Their weirdness… choices… struggle… craft…. voice. The author isn’t simply the person whose name happens to be on the cover… they are a part of the product. So what happens when AI enters that relationship… and is that really so different from a ghostwriter? Would we agree that using AI to find a better word/turn of phrase feels fine, but asking it to write a chapter is crossing some kind of line? Using it to research a place feels different from asking it to invent the characters. Editing with AI feels different from generating the book with it.

Except… where exactly is the line?

That question becomes even stranger when we leave literature. The Economist recently analyzed parliamentary speeches using an AI-detection system and found substantial amounts of likely AI-assisted language. Politicians, of course, have always had speechwriters, researchers and staffers. So if an elected official gives AI their position, arguments, legislation and source material and asks it to turn those thoughts into a better speech… is that fundamentally different from handing the same job to a human speechwriter?

Maybe… maybe not?

Can the answer really be: “AI touched it, therefore it isn’t human”? From where I sit in non-fiction/business writing, these tools are becoming embedded in how we research, edit, communicate and create (I mean… they’re increasingly becoming part of almost every piece of software we use). I’m left wondering if culturally, our definition of authorship will change with them? Sampling changed music… digital tools changed photography… editing software changed filmmaking… I even stroll the floor at ComicCon and see how many of the artists work, almost exclusively, on an iPad. When did we stop staring at the tool and start judging what people did with it in these various creative industries?

But… maybe… there’s something else going on here?

And, maybe, it’s the delineation line we have yet to define… the moment when the tool stops helping you express the idea and starts generating the expression itself? Is that the line we’re struggling to locate? Maybe the better test is how much of the thinking… choosing… imagining… and expression still belongs to the person whose name is attached to it? We’re in that moment. Machines can, increasingly, sound and feel human. So maybe authorship becomes less about who typed the words…

And more about whose mind they came from?

(and I’ve been tinkering on this idea for some time: Welcome To Vibe Content)

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.