I recently wrote a piece — and did a Science Moment — arguing that AI may bring about the end of the “finished project.” Books, movies, video games, documentaries, courses… all these things have traditionally required someone to choose one particular final form and then spend months or years building it. But if AI can eventually take the underlying idea and build the version each of us personally wants, why bother? Maybe creators stop making the final thing and instead make what I called the “generative core”: the canonical specification of the idea, from which anyone’s AI can generate whatever particular instantiation they want.
There’s a problem with this that I hadn’t really appreciated. A big one. What happens to the incentive to create the generative core? Today, if I spend five years developing a genuinely new idea and then another three years writing a book around it, copyright protects the book. Sure, you can understand my idea and use it yourself, but historically that only got you so far. If you wanted your own book, movie, or game built around it, you still had to do the enormous work of actually making one. AI is killing that barrier. Soon I may spend years discovering the idea, reveal it in my work, and you simply extract the underlying idea and ask AI to make something completely different from it — perhaps something you like better than mine. No copied sentences. No copied characters. Maybe no recognizable similarity at all on the surface. Copyright working exactly as designed. Except the valuable thing I discovered is now yours.
And that sets off a nasty cascade. First, why spend five years making the finished book or movie if bespoke instantiations are becoming cheap? Fine — that was my earlier essay. Forget the finished project. Develop and publish the generative core instead. But then why publish the generative core if publishing it amounts to giving it away? And if that’s the case, why spend five years struggling to discover the generative core in the first place? AI starts out threatening the incentive to finish things. Follow the logic far enough and it threatens the incentive to find genuinely new things in the first place.
Oddly enough, we solved something like this problem centuries ago. Just not for books, movies, games, scientific conceptions, and most other kinds of ideas. We solved it for inventions. We call the solution a patent.
Patents and copyrights protect quite different things, and historically the distinction made a lot of sense. If you invent a new machine, process, or technology, a patent can protect the invention across different implementations. You don’t just own the particular prototype sitting on your workbench. In fact, you don’t necessarily need to have built a prototype at all. If the invention has been sufficiently conceived and disclosed, and meets the other requirements for patentability, the intellectual achievement can exist before any finished product does. Someone else can later build it at another scale, with different materials and all sorts of engineering changes, and still be implementing your invention.
Why protect something so abstract? Because the expensive part may have been figuring it out. You spend ten years discovering how to do X. The day you reveal X, I understand it and start making my own version. You bore the cost of discovery; I got much of its value essentially for free. If that happens systematically, fewer people bother making those costly discoveries. So we make a bargain with inventors: tell us how your invention works rather than keeping it secret, and for a limited period we’ll give you certain rights over implementations of it. Patent law has long recognized that the important intellectual creation need not be a particular artifact. It can be the idea that generates the artifacts.
Copyright made almost the opposite bargain. We very deliberately do not let people own ideas. You can copyright your novel, not “two lovers from hostile families.” Your movie, not “aliens invade Earth.” Your game, not “civilizations compete for territory.” And thank God. Ideas are the raw material for more ideas, and culture would suffocate if someone could plant a flag in every concept and demand payment from anyone who wandered nearby.
But there was also a practical fact making this division work, so obvious that we barely had to think about it. Having the idea was nowhere near having the thing. An idea for a novel isn’t a novel. An idea for a movie isn’t a movie. An idea for a video game isn’t a video game. Between conception and finished work stood an often brutal amount of writing, rewriting, programming, acting, filming, composing, drawing, editing, designing, financing. We could leave ideas free because there was still an enormous amount of difficult work between having one and producing the thing people actually wanted.
AI is destroying that practical fact.
The distance between idea and instantiation is collapsing. Suppose I spend years developing some genuinely new conceptual structure — call it G. From G one could make a novel, movie, game, television series, interactive world, whatever. Until recently, knowing G didn’t remotely give you all those things. Every one of them was another mountain of work. Now that mountain is starting to look more like a button.
So I finally reveal G in a novel. You read it, figure out what makes it tick, and tell your AI: “Take this underlying idea, but don’t copy his book. Different setting. Different characters. Different prose. Make it funnier. Make the protagonist more like me. And actually, don’t make it a book — make it a twenty-hour interactive experience.” The result might infringe nothing. That’s the point. I’m not worried here about AI getting better at copyright infringement. I’m worried about what happens when AI gets very good at NOT infringing copyright — at extracting the generative idea from a work and then going somewhere completely different with it.
Now our old intellectual-property arrangement starts looking strangely backwards. We protect the artifact just as artifacts are becoming cheap to generate, while leaving the generative idea unprotected just as the idea may be becoming the scarce part. AI may be turning what used to be copyright problems into the kinds of problems patents were designed to solve.
This doesn’t mean we should simply start patenting ideas. Horrifying. Someone patents “a detective who turns out to be the murderer.” Someone else gets “a society controlled by AI.” Another person owns “a multiplayer game about territorial conquest.” Within six months human culture is a minefield of infringement claims. The old rule that ideas remain free exists for very good reasons.
But maybe “idea” and “finished work” aren’t the only two categories we need anymore. There’s something in between. That’s where the generative core comes in. Not a theme. Not a genre. Not a one-sentence premise. The minimal but sufficiently precise conceptual machinery that makes an idea distinctive and allows all sorts of different things to be generated from it.
AI makes this less philosophical than it sounds. Give it the core and it can instantiate it. Give it an instantiation and it may be able to infer the core. Two works could share almost nothing obvious on the surface and still derive from the same underlying machinery. So “Did you copy my work?” may eventually miss the interesting part. Another question starts to matter: “Did you instantiate the generative idea I discovered?”
That sounds a lot like the question patents already ask.
I don’t know what rights, if any, should eventually attach to a generative core. But there is a much simpler place to start: attribution. We need some way to say, clearly and publicly, who originated a sufficiently specific new idea and when. Even if that initially carries no legal rights whatsoever. Before we can decide whether people should have any claim over the downstream instantiations of their ideas, we at least need a serious way of keeping track of where those ideas came from.
Credit is an incentive too. And once generative cores can be stated, dated and attributed, we can begin arguing about whether anything more should follow. The important first move is recognizing the core itself as an intellectual contribution rather than treating only its particular instantiations as things with authors.
Because the old bargain is coming apart. Copyright arose in a world where we could leave ideas free partly because turning them into valuable finished things remained hard. Patent law addressed domains where the discovery itself might be the hard part, and where, once revealed, it could become relatively easy for others to build from it. AI is making more of human creativity look like that.
And that could be wonderful. I meant it when I wrote that the disappearance of the finished project could unleash entirely new forms of creativity. We might spend more of our lives developing deep new ideas and less of our lives grinding out one particular realization of each of them.
But only if people still have a reason to reveal those ideas. And before that, a reason to spend years finding them.
If AI gives everyone an astonishing machine for instantiating ideas, while we have no meaningful way even to preserve who originated those ideas, we may end up with exactly the wrong incentives: enormous demand for new ideas, almost unlimited ability to exploit them, and less reason to do the difficult human work of finding them.
We invented patents because, at least once before, we realized that was a bad bargain.