Why Copyright Challenges to AI Learning Will Fail and the Ethical Reasons Why They Shouldn’t

Well, I didn’t see this coming. Talking about legal and philosophical conceptions of copyright turns out to be intellectually fascinating and challenging. It involves not only concepts about property and theft, but also about personhood and invasiveness. Could it be that training AI with author/artist work violates their self?


I talked with Darren Hick about all this, who wrote a few books on the topic. I definitely didn’t think he was going to bring up Hegel.

Darren Hudson Hick is an assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, specializing in philosophical issues in copyright, forgery, authorship, and related areas. He is the author of Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation (Chicago, 2017) and Introducing Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Bloomsbury, 2023), and the co-editor of The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying (Bloomsbury, 2016). Dr. Hick gained significant media attention as one of the first professors to catch a student using ChatGPT to plagiarize an assignment.