Who Decides What's Creative? AI and the Authorship Question

Every time a new tool shows up, the same question resurfaces: who is actually the author here?

It happened with photography. It happened with digital editing. Now it's happening with AI — and the stakes feel higher because the tools are more capable, the outputs more convincing, and the money behind them is enormous.

But the question itself is old. Is AI the death of art? UNESCO has been asking it. Artists have been asking it. And the honest answer is that nobody has settled it yet.

What's different now is the speed. The tools aren't arriving one at a time anymore. They're arriving all at once, and the people building them are moving faster than the people thinking about what any of it means.

Here's what Lesly Lynch, founder and director of Space Cowboys Studio, actually said: AI can expand the canvas, but it can't decide what's worth painting.

That line is worth sitting with.

A bigger canvas is real. More colors, more brushes, faster execution — all of that is real. If you know what you want to make, AI gives you more ways to make it. That's genuinely useful.

But the deciding part — what deserves to exist, what idea is worth pursuing, what a piece of work should feel like — that doesn't come from the tool. It never has. A camera doesn't decide what to photograph. A piano doesn't decide what to play.

The creative act is the choice. Everything else is execution.

AI is very good at execution. That's powerful. But execution without intention is just output. And the world already has plenty of output.

This is the part that matters most, and it's the part that gets skipped in most conversations about AI and creativity.

If creators don't claim their role — loudly, publicly, with some urgency — then someone else will define what creativity is. And that someone will be a tech company, a platform, or an investor.

None of those entities have bad intentions necessarily. But they have different incentives. Their job is to build products people use, to grow engagement, to return value to shareholders. That's what they optimize for.

Culture is not what they optimize for.

Lesly Lynch put it plainly: the rules could be dictated by tech companies, platforms, and investors. And culture has never been just the engineers' domain.

There's also a policy angle. Europe is trying to get ahead of this with its AI regulation framework. Whether it works is a separate question. But at least it's an acknowledgment that someone needs to draw lines — and that those lines shouldn't be drawn exclusively by the people selling the tools.

Lynch uses the phrase reivindicar la figura del creador — reclaiming the figure of the creator. It's a good phrase because it implies something has been lost, or is at risk of being lost.

Not the ability to create. That's not going anywhere. But the recognition that there is a creator — a human with intention and judgment and taste — behind anything worth calling art.

That recognition matters practically, not just philosophically. It affects copyright. It affects how we train models. It affects whether artists get paid. It affects what counts as authorship when a piece generated by AI gets used commercially.

These aren't abstract questions. They're already showing up in courts and contracts and licensing disputes.

The conversation about creativity and AI tends to get stuck in the philosophical end — can a machine be creative, really? That question is interesting but it's almost a distraction. The practical question is simpler: when something gets made, who is responsible for it? And who benefits?

Answering that requires putting the creator back in the center of the frame.

Every technology that touched art also shifted power. The printing press moved it away from the Church. Photography moved it away from painted portraiture. The internet moved it away from gatekeeping publishers and labels — and then concentrated it in platforms instead.

AI is doing the same thing. It's a power shift, dressed up as a productivity gain.

The question isn't whether to use the tools. Most of us will. The question is whether we use them with enough awareness of what we're trading away — or not trading away — when we do.

Bruce Brubaker's The Big Ship is a useful reference point here: a piece that sits at the intersection of classical performance and technology, where the human is still clearly present, still clearly making choices.

That's the model. Not resisting the tools. Not fetishizing them either. Using them, but staying in the seat.

Culture has never been just the engineers' domain. And it shouldn't start being now.