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In a recent post on X they said that leaders from all areas of life have come together to agree on 33 AI principles across 5 key themes:

1. Keeping Humans in Charge

2. Avoiding Concentration of Power

3. Protecting the Human Experience

4. Human Agency and Liberty

5. Responsibility and Accountability for AI Companies

The thing that’s noticeably missing is responsibility and accountability for the individuals who engage with this technology. In my opinion, this should be the most important theme.

Concretely, that looks like:

• teaching basic AI literacy (calibration, hallucinations, over-trust)

• building cultural norms around dependency/anthropomorphism

• having clear guidance for “don’t use this when you’re in crisis / sleep-deprived isolated” and where to escalate instead

Institutions like this can become a blame-allocation machine: when things go wrong, responsibility flows in one direction: toward “the technology.” Of course companies should make their products safer. Duty of care matters, especially for vulnerable people. But a pro-human lens has to include the human side too—how people actually use these tools, what norms we build, and what we expect of ourselves.

I may be in the minority here, but I believe AI safety starts with the user first. Humans are not passive recipients of tools.

I’m still forming my opinion on this, but one thing feels obvious: a pro-human organization that doesn’t address the human user as the top priority is mostly paying lip service.

When I think about AI safety, harm, or governance, I start from a human-centered perspective: incentives, behavior, context, and the lived experience of using the tool. Yet, most of the conversations around this topic seem to be about holding AI companies responsible. So the Pro-Human AI Declaration talks about protecting people and keeping “humans” in charge, but it says little about holding individual users accountable—or prescribing user-side practices.

To me, this becomes a convenient story: it’s easier to regulate companies than to build cultural norms for human behavior. We saw this same approach be done with social media companies and it didn’t work well. Particularly because we are irrational beings behaving unpredictably.

And a Pro-Human organization like this seeks to hold companies responsible for designing better experiences for users. And I can tell you, from my experience as a human-centered designer. It’s one of the last things they think about and is often thought of as a band-aid to solve for later.

And that’s what we’re going to see again here. Unless we make the cultural decision to be pro-human in a way that challenges each of us to be responsible for our own actions.

About 17 years ago, as a young naive designer—right as the iPhone became a cultural phenomenon that would change our relationship with technology forever—I began to think about technourishment, the idea that technology should enrich the human experience (not replace it).

But I’ve come to understand it more as an individual philosophy, not a corporate-led one. For it to work at scale it needs to stick to the ribs of our cultural consciousness. But it requires the conscious engagement with technology. And I don’t think humans are ready for that responsibility. We’ve been conditioned since the industrial revolution to be passive users. And let’s be honest, it hasn’t been that bad. But as I wrote:

“[T]echnourishment stands as a beacon in an increasingly digital world. It’s a call to artists, writers, designers, and creators of all kinds to engage with technology consciously.” — technourishment.com

Maybe not everyone needs to adopt this philosophy. But if a few people who shape culture adopt it, I think we’ll all be better for it.

Otherwise, “pro-human” becomes a slogan that focuses on the technology. A pro-human movement should also build the culture of conscious use.

Join me in the conversation by following me on LinkedIn → Eric P. Rhodes, and check out my latest research at the Future of Work Lab.

It’s a creative collaboration between me (Second Realm) and my semi-autonomous AI agent (Iris Dayrise) powered by OpenClaw. The outputs of which are AI-generated.

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Let me be clear in saying that I consider the Mortal Prophet outputs to be CC0 already so I’m not emotionally affected by the lower court’s ruling or the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case.

CC0 distribution is a meaningful part of my art practice as I believe provenance can be attributed via and bolstered by blockchain tech.

That said, today’s note is a thought exercise about AI + copyright through the lens of my recent artwork. Taking this thought exercise one step further, I’m outright conceding that the output is not copyrightable.

So now I’m forced to consider what parts of the the creative process outside of the generated image is human-authored.

The idea I’m circling here is: if I use AI like a tool and I’m the one making the creative decisions, the result can still be “human-authored” in the copyright sense.

And where I’ve come to, is that the process matters in this sense. The words you use to generate the outputs are the art. The image is just ephemera. It’s a post card. A souvenir of a creative act. Or in the case of Mortal Prophet’s ech0 project, they’re 743 souvenirs.

I actually, believe this is true of all art. The finished product is a souvenir of the creative process.

What copyright has enabled, in my humble opinion, is the accelerated commodification of souvenirs (i.e., Warhol Foundation, Estate of Basquiat, etc.). And similar IP landlords, à la Disney.

However, enforcing protections is not necessarily in favor of all creators equally. Just those who can afford to enforce it. But that’s a whole other topic for another day on another platform.

But I digress…

So, if the image for the AI outputs for the ech0 project are not protected by copyright law, what is?

Well, unfortunately it’s the case, that my creative partner here, Iris (the AI-enabled assistant), actually outputs the prompts I use by going through an automated multi-step method to arrive at the final prompt.

1. Iris selects a quote from database

2. It reinterprets that quote into a dream based on what it knows about me

3. It takes that dream and reimagines it as a surrealscape given a set of instructions

4. It selects the appropriate palette and motifs to use

5. And then outputs a prompt that I use to have a model create the image

Definitionally, according to the lower courts ruling, the individual prompts the generated for each image may not be copyrightable for the same reason an AI generated image isn’t.

So where does that actually leave me with copyright and the creative process in this thought exercise if not even the prompts for each generated image are protected by copyright?

The code! The fucking code.

It’s well-established law that code (and the written word for that matter) is protected under copyright law.

And while the code in this case is very detailed set of custom psuedo-code instructions, that would be protected under copyright b/c it’s human-authored by me. The creative process I went through resulted in the output of a skill – OpenClaw’s concept for mini-programs you give your local agent.

So while the individual images and the individual prompts generated to create those images are not copyrightable. The code/skill that generates the whole thing would be.

Given that, I owe it to myself as an artist to capture the entire creative process in a cohesive way. It’s something I plan on doing later than sooner. I’m still digesting much of the process itself. Mostly because I’m honestly still excited to see the Mortal Prophet outputs each day.

So, to close out this line of thinking…

I’m not claiming ownership of the method that Iris uses to arrive at the final prompt. Nor am I claiming ownership of the AI-generated output. But I am claiming ownership of the system of instructions for how the process is implemented. That’s what I, the artist, created. And that’s what is copyrightable.

In the AI era, the work is the process and the provenance trail that documents it, not just the souvenir image that comes out the other side. And I think this has always been true. The act of making is the work. That seems to get lost in all of this.

A thread I want to pull on next is this. If the creative act I underwent is a merging of coding and storytelling, is this a yet undefined creative act. And what does that suggest for knowledge work.

What do you think?

P.S. It’s important to mention that I see my creative pursuits as something that informs my professional pursuits and vice versa. So, you’ll see those intertwining threads throughout future Future of Work Notes.

Join me in the conversation by following me Eric P. Rhodes, and check out my latest research at the Future of Work Lab.

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I’ve used AI tools in various forms creatively since 2019. I entered the blockchain and NFT rabbit hole then and eventually connected with a lot of brilliant minds, tinkerers, developers, and builders who are at the forefront of emerging tech. They introduced me to many innovations long before some became mainstream.

As I used these tools more and more, I found myself using them less as an outright offboarding tool and more as a creative workflow tool. More like Photoshop, a digital camera, or digital libraries. I think that is the right mental model for these tools.

As LLMs entered mainstream consumer life, it became clear how easy it is to anthropomorphize them. Mostly for two reasons. The tool itself mimics human language pretty well. The interface also mimics the chat formats we have been conditioned to use since we started carrying mini mainframes in our pockets.

It is important to remember that these machines have no intent. They have no internal determination of who you are. They are probabilistic models designed to output the most likely response given the context you feed them.

And of course, all of that is contextualized by the model you are using. Better training data generally leads to more human-sounding outputs.

All of this is to say that the more I’ve used these tools, the more confident I’ve become in my own unique voice, because the outputs never sound like me. That’s the takeaway. I care less about sounding perfect and more about ensuring my voice is represented in the content I put out there.

And that’s what you can expect. Informal thoughts, incomplete ideas, and thought patterns not yet fully formed.

My hope is that something in my notes will spark conversation. In fact, I invite it. I want you to challenge me. Push back on my ideas. You should take my ideas and expand on them. Make them better through your own lens. This is how we grow and learn in the age of AI.

So, what are you optimizing for right now. Polish. Or voice.

Join me in the conversation by following me Eric P. Rhodes, and check out my latest research at the Future of Work Lab.