Models absorb human creativity without consent, then label human-directed work as machine-made, creating a troubling double erasure of authorship.
A system built to flag synthetic content ends up flattening every degree of human involvement into one undifferentiated “machine-made” category. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Models absorb human creativity without consent, then label human-directed work as machine-made, creating a troubling double erasure of authorship.
Every time someone asks an AI tool to draft an email, polish an essay or write a report, an invisible marker gets attached to the result, classifying it as “AI-generated.” It discounts the human who wrote the prompt, steered the revisions and approved the final version.
It also sits on top of a deeper problem: these models learned to write by ingesting decades of human writing, much of it without consent or payment. Humans are erased twice: once when their past work trains the model without credit, and again when their present work gets tagged as not quite theirs. That double erasure is the real story.
