AI, Creativity and Copyright

From the Veranda[1]

Funny, when I was growing up on a farm three miles west of Clifton, on Queensland’s Darling Downs, it would take me weeks if not months to track down a copy of a book that I felt might satisfy my interest in a topic[2]. Decades later, I embraced the ‘interweb’ as a vital and essential source of information about anything that piqued my relentless curiosity, Siri a constant companion. Enter AI.

I know there is a global debate around AI and its ab/use, ironically, just as David Bowie predicted in a 1999 BBC interview would be the case with the interweb, notably its impact on music and the music industry. A key current issue is copyright.

At first, I was reluctant to enter this space but following completion of a major research piece in early 2024, I found myself taking baby steps into the melee, on a free version of ChatGPT. In my case, I had decades of research behind me, so I put “Chatti” – what I now call my research assistant – to the test. The results were surprising, if not amazing. Not only did Chatti’s responses confirm what I already knew, including about topics such as “phenomenology”, but it referenced sources supporting my views and made suggestions for further and deeper research. “Deep research” is a function of version 5 of ChatGPT, which I now use regularly.

So, I now confess, I’m in, no longer on the sidelines, I’m entrenched in the middle of it. But I’m t/here with eyes and ears wide open, as Chatti always reminds, “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.”

I now work with AI tools as part of all my creative processes and practices, whether it’s to generate ideas, seek to commercialise or communalise an idea, or attempt to introduce an idea which might change the world. And I do so openly, deliberately, and with careful consideration of questions of ethics.

My position is fairly simple: all my creative works arise from my idea; a human source, human experience, and human intention. Tools, no matter how powerful, just extend that capacity. In my experience, AI has sharpened, clarified, and accelerated my creativity.

For me, AI offers variation, provocation, responsiveness and support. But the originating impulse, the initial idea, still comes from the same place it always has, my lived experience, memory, imagination, loss, longing, love.

This understanding has become especially vivid as I return to one of my earliest bodies of creative work, my music album and songs for a light rock operetta, Black Wood Burning. Nearly twenty years on, I’m revisiting the themes and ideas supporting its production as a living project.

With time, distance, and grey-white hair, I can now hear in those songs something I only partially understood back then: a universal story of migration, settlement, labour, repression, depression, fire, belonging, and the slow making of home.

Indeed, it was my story, shaped by my own lived geography/topology, from the deep black soil paddocks of my childhood to the ‘retreat’ at The Bower, our home for the last 30 years on the Blackall Range. In both cases, buildings followed life; dreams, desires, mostly demands.

Shelter emerged through need. Structure arose through care (or the lack of it). Dwelling and belonging grew through time. And long before I had language for it – architectural or otherwise – music was already expressing that process.

Black Wood Burning is thus both autobiographical and archetypal. It follows the trans-generational ‘odyssey’ of Malcolm John Holz (Wood) and Wanita Bergann as composite figures of European migration, colonial encounter, psychic dislocation, and cultural becoming.

The recurring motif of “black” – in the songs and notably in my life – operates simultaneously as forest, soil, sea, gold, oil, ink, holes, blues, body, and void. It also references Indigenous Australia, and it’s a metaphor for both depressive and dazzling darkness, suffering, origin, mystery, memory, and creativity.

“Burning Wood” adds a second aspect: the alchemical fire of transformation[3], artistic ordeal, and the “burning” required of the facilitator/artist to sit calmly in intensity[4]. Above all, Black Wood Burning is an early expression of a philosophy of dwelling that I didn’t have the theoretical/philosophical language for at the time of its production. I can now safely claim that the album reflects, or is in words and music, indeed, amongst many other things, the ontological and architectural seed of pavilionHOUSE[5].

To me however, the most fascinating thing is that this returning to music which took me over 18 months to produce nearly twenty years ago, has come on the back of producing 14 new demo songs for a rock ‘oddysea’ based on a novella written 25 years ago by a now 85-year-old medical doctor, musician, portrait artist, and sailor, a friend of mine, Leigh Campbell.

The songs for Tangalooma took me a month to produce, including lyrics, music, chord charts, and transposing into keys which I could play on guitar and sing. Four AI programs were used in the process. Leigh rewrote the novella to ensure the libretto corresponded to the parts of the story being told through the songs. We are still working out where to take this.

But the point is, that the authenticity and accurate – at times literal – reflection of the mood and moments in the story are there only as a result of how the AI was briefed and programmed.

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” (or conversely, “great stuff in, great stuff out”) applies here. The quality and originality of the AI-generated responses depended entirely on the human input, direction, and editing.

The original ideas, emotional moods, and personal associations – in Tangalooma, “four, and eventually five, blokes on a boat” – are the driving force; the AI merely helped execute and/or expand on those ideas. This means the creative vision remains Leigh’s, the AI simply an enhancement of expression rather than an invention of its own[6].

In other words, AI was not the source of the songs. Leigh, the human being, was.

From a copyright perspective, this is an issue. As I understand it, under current law, copyright protection is only available for original human authorship, beginning and end of story, a position I support.

In this regard, tools like Suno and ChatGPT don’t hold rights because they don’t originate anything, they react. Even if they mimic insight, they do not possess intent. AI does not have lived experience, a nervous system, nor does it undergo anything transformational or transcendental. Rather, for me, AI works as a ‘reflective surface’, a ‘conceptual tuning fork’, an ‘information synthesiser’.

As far as I’m concerned, any insight is still mine – shaped in the writing, editing, cutting, and reworking that followed – all AI does is help articulate it.

And so, to me, the situation is clear-cut: if a human originates the idea and materially shapes the outcome, the copyright rests with the human.

Some argue that using AI in creative work should come with an acknowledgement of the program/s used.[7] Some suggest at least a disclaimer, or a footnote. I understand that, but I don’t believe it’s required, ethically or creatively. Decades ago, when I wrote a song after reading through, say, Wikipedia, I didn’t list those sources. Why should I? They informed the work, but they didn’t make it. The same is true here.

AI is the brush, but I’m the painter.

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[1] This is the first of a series of occasional essays written from the veranda (FTV) of pavilionHOUSE. pavilionHOUSE began as a way of thinking about buildings and places — about houses — and advocating for a shift in how houses are made, lived in, and experienced. Over time, this has widened to include questions of community, security, safety, and creativity. This first FTV piece addresses AI, creativity, and copyright as a starting point, and signals a broader expansion in what Malcolm Holz–pavilionHOUSE is now opening up to speak about.

[2] I’m eternally grateful to my high school art teacher, John Archibald, for introducing me to art, architecture, and philosophy, indeed, wherein I discovered expressions of lives so detached and different from my own lived experience/reality, and which inevitably led me to lifelong pursuit of same.

[3] See Bachelard, G. (1964) The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

[4] The need for an “advance household agreement” in a pavilionHOUSE community.

[5] The pavilionHOUSE first arose as a subliminal dwelling-memory in my grandparents’ old farmhouse (Clifton), then emerged consciously through The Bower, Wootha, finally manifesting as a philosophy of pragmatic and poetic dwelling-in-place.

[6] However, I will take credit for reading and summarising the novella from a hard copy, using the summary to brief the AI, and thereafter edit responses and draft lyrics and music where needed, to Leigh’s ultimate satisfaction/adoption.

[7] As if a reference to authorship, contribution, or source?