☀️ Summer Reading Picks (July 2025): AI, Copyright, and the Cult of Creativity

This summer’s reading selection reveals a complex reality: we’re experiencing a fundamental rethinking of creativity itself, one that forces us to examine not just legal frameworks but the very foundations of how we value and compensate creative work.

These four pieces each address different facets of this transformation. Taken together, they form a compelling narrative about a system under unprecedented strain. They also happen to represent some of the finest thinking currently available on these issues, which is why I’m encouraging you to carve out time for the full articles rather than settling for my summaries alone.

The Economic Foundation: How Traditional Models Are Cracking

Andrés Guadamuz, “How AI is Breaking Traditional Remuneration Models” TechnoLlama

Written by Andrés Guadamuz, a leading scholar in internet law and intellectual property at the University of Sussex, this piece cuts straight to the economic heart of our current predicament. Guadamuz possesses that rare combination of technical understanding and policy insight that allows him to see patterns others miss.

His central observation is deceptively simple yet profound: the traditional “work → licensing → remuneration” model that has sustained creative industries simply cannot accommodate how AI systems actually operate. Think of it this way: copyright economics have always depended on a clear transaction between creator and consumer, mediated by publishers, distributors, and collecting societies. But AI training disrupts this entire chain.

In general, what happens when an AI model ingests millions of works? There is reproduction, yes, but no publication in any meaningful sense. No consumer goes to ChatGPT to read The Hobbit; they go there to understand what hobbits represent in fantasy literature. The AI extracts statistical patterns rather than distributing creative expression. This distinction, Guadamuz argues, renders traditional licensing frameworks not just inadequate but fundamentally misaligned with the underlying technology.

What strikes me most about his analysis is how he connects this technical reality to broader economic shifts already underway. The creator economy was already challenging traditional intermediaries before AI arrived. Influencers, streamers, and independent creators have been building direct relationships with audiences, bypassing the very institutions that copyright law assumes will handle licensing and remuneration.

Guadamuz doesn’t pretend to have solutions, which I find refreshing in a field crowded with premature fixes. Instead, he offers something more valuable: a clear diagnosis of why existing approaches feel so inadequate. His piece serves as essential groundwork for understanding why the copyright battles ahead will require new thinking rather than retrofitted old models.

The Historical Context: Deconstructing Our Creativity Obsession

Samuel Franklin Interview by Bryan Gardiner, “The Cult of Creativity: How an Idea Became Our Reigning Value” MIT Technology Review

This interview with Samuel Franklin, a historian and design researcher at Delft University of Technology, provides the historical lens we desperately need to understand our current moment. Franklin’s book The Cult of Creativity traces how “creativity” evolved from a nearly nonexistent concept before 1950 to what he calls our “reigning value” today.

Here’s what stopped me cold: the first recorded use of “creativity” didn’t occur until 1875. More surprising: before 1950, there were essentially zero books, articles, or academic treatments of creativity as we understand it. This means our entire cultural obsession with creativity is historically recent, emerging in response to specific post-war anxieties about conformity and bureaucratisation.

Franklin’s research reveals creativity as what he terms “a cultural salve,” designed to reconcile individual expression with corporate structures. It promised to “unleash individualism within order” and “revive the spirit of the lone inventor within the maze of the modern corporation.” This historical framing illuminates why our current debates about AI and creativity feel so emotionally charged. It’s not just about artistic expression; it pertains to a relatively recent cultural construct that was itself a response to technological disruption.

The interview’s most provocative insight concerns Silicon Valley’s strategic embrace of creativity as branding. By wrapping itself in artistic and countercultural imagery, the tech industry has deflected scrutiny while maintaining its disruptive agenda. This helps explain why so many discussions about AI and creativity seem to talk past each other: participants are operating with fundamentally different assumptions about what creativity actually means and why it matters.

Franklin’s reframing question resonates deeply: rather than asking whether machines can be “truly creative,” shouldn’t we focus on whether they can be “wise, honest, caring”? This shift in perspective could transform how we approach AI development and integration into creative processes.

The Legal Reality: How Courts Are Actually Deciding These Cases

Pamela Samuelson, “Does Using In-Copyright Works as Training Data Infringe?” Kluwer Copyright Blog

This piece by Pamela Samuelson, the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Berkeley and a pioneer in digital copyright law, cuts through the speculation surrounding AI copyright litigation in the US with surgical precision. Samuelson has been analysing the intersection of technology and copyright law for decades, and her insights into the first two US judicial decisions on AI training (Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta) provide our clearest window into how these disputes will likely unfold.

Both judges found that some AI training uses could qualify as fair use, but their disagreements reveal the complexity ahead. The fault lines are fascinating: one judge dismissed concerns about using “pirated” books for training, arguing that fair use analysis should focus on the transformative purpose rather than the source. The other was deeply troubled by the use of unauthorised copies, viewing it as inherently problematic regardless of the ultimate purpose.

Even more significant is what Samuelson calls the “market dilution” theory emerging in these cases. This novel approach suggests that AI systems could harm copyright markets not by producing infringing works, but by flooding markets with so much competing content that human creators can no longer earn a living. Judge Chhabria in the Kadrey case expressed particular concern about “the rapid generation of countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing.”

I find this market dilution theory both fascinating and concerning. It represents a potentially dramatic expansion of copyright’s reach, moving beyond traditional concerns about unauthorised copying to encompass broader market effects. Samuelson’s critique of this approach is measured but pointed: copyright law has historically focused on specific acts of infringement, not speculative economic impacts from legal competition.

What emerges from her analysis is a US legal landscape in flux, where traditional doctrinal categories are being stretched to accommodate unprecedented technological capabilities. 

The Rights Framework: When Human Rights Logic Goes Awry

Elena Izyumenko, “Copyright as a Freedom of Artistic Expression Right: The Dangers and Human Rights Law Misconceptions” Kluwer Copyright Blog

This analysis by Elena Izyumenko, Assistant Professor in Intellectual Property Law at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam, tackles what might seem like an arcane European legal dispute but actually raises fundamental questions about the entire relationship between copyright and human rights.

The case involves Kraftwerk (yes, the electronic music pioneers) and a hip-hop artist who sampled two seconds of their music. But Izyumenko focuses on something more troubling: the Advocate General’s novel argument that copyright holders’ exclusive rights stem not just from property rights but from their fundamental right to freedom of artistic expression.

This might sound like strengthening protection for creators, but she rightfully identifies a profound conceptual error. When human rights language was first introduced into copyright discourse, the goal was to constrain overly expansive copyright protection by emphasising users’ rights to freedom of expression. The AG’s opinion flips this logic, using freedom of expression to justify stronger exclusive rights against follow-up creators.

Think about the implications: if original creators’ freedom of expression trumps derivative creators’ freedom of expression, and if this right ranks higher than mere property rights, then copyright becomes nearly impregnable against fair use or other limitations. This represents what Izyumenko calls an “upside-down” logic that transforms human rights from a tool for balancing interests into a weapon for reinforcing exclusivity.

What makes this particularly significant is how it connects to broader debates about AI and creativity. If we accept that copyright serves primarily to protect original creators’ expressive rights rather than to balance various interests, then any AI use of copyrighted material becomes much harder to justify, regardless of its transformative nature or social benefits.

Izyumenko also points out that this approach contradicts international human rights authorities, who have consistently emphasised that copyright protection is not itself a human right and should not override users’ rights to access and build upon existing works.

The Larger Pattern: Why These Pieces Illuminate Each Other

Reading these four pieces in sequence reveals a troubling pattern. Each author, working in their respective domain, identifies how existing frameworks are proving inadequate to technological change. But more than that, they show how efforts to strengthen those frameworks often backfire, creating new problems while failing to solve the original ones.

Guadamuz demonstrates that traditional economic models cannot accommodate AI’s approach to using creative works. Franklin reveals that our cultural obsession with creativity is historically contingent and potentially counterproductive. Samuelson shows that courts are developing novel legal theories that may expand copyright in unpredictable ways. Izyumenko warns that even human rights frameworks are being deployed to reinforce rather than balance exclusive rights.

What emerges is not just a story about legal or economic transition, but about the deeper challenge of adapting human institutions to technological capabilities that operate on fundamentally different principles. The question is not whether AI will change how we think about creativity, compensation, and rights. The question is whether we can manage that transition in ways that serve human flourishing rather than merely protecting existing power structures.

My Key Takeaways

I find myself increasingly convinced that our current moment demands intellectual humility rather than dogmatic certainty. Each of these authors demonstrates that humility in different ways: Guadamuz by acknowledging he doesn’t have ready solutions, Franklin by questioning our most basic assumptions about creativity, Samuelson by carefully analysing rather than predicting legal outcomes, and Izyumenko by identifying when ostensibly progressive arguments actually serve regressive purposes.

This intellectual honesty makes each piece worth engaging seriously. They offer not just information but frameworks for thinking through problems that will likely persist and evolve for years to come. Whether you approach these issues from legal, technical, economic, or creative perspectives, these pieces provide essential groundwork for the more sophisticated conversations we need to be having.

The stakes, as Franklin notes, are not merely technical or legal but cultural and social. How we resolve these tensions will shape not just the future of creative industries but our broader understanding of human agency in an age of increasingly capable machines. That seems worth a summer afternoon’s reading, don’t you think?

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M. , Head of Research.