From Ownership of Intellectual Products to Possession of Ideas: A Brief Essay on Human Intellectual Value in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The recent development of the use of LLMs and other type of AI in the literary production, or "distant writing" as recently theorized by Luciano Floridi (Floridi, 2025), calls for a profound shift in the conceptualization of authorship and intellectual property rights. This paper examines the evolving landscape of human-AI collaboration, proposing a reorientation from the traditional legal notion of ownership of the intellectual work product towards a new focus on possession of ideas. Looking at philosophical, legal, and anthropological perspectives, the essay argue that possession would reflect more accurately the human relationships and the value of humans in presenting new ideas in the context of AI-mediated creation. Using a metaphorical perspective over the relationship with the ideas, the author of the essay advocates shifting the valuation of human creativity from giving weight to materialization to giving weight to ideation. The proposal is for the use of recognition of possession of ideas as a new model of rights over the literary production that honors the primordial and unique human role: the recognition, reception, and shaping of ideas, with priority to their material transformation guided by their social value. When automation makes materialization accessible to everybody, it is only the ability to ideate that will become the human unique characteristic of wealth creation.

Keywords: artificial intelligence, large language models, distant writing, authorship, copyright, intellectual property, labor, possession