This one word is at the heart of legal debate surrounding AI, and it’s the cornerstone of copyright law.

“Fair use” is what lets us all (re)mix the elements of copyrighted works—the entire platform of YouTube is built on the concept. But no one can really define it. There are guidelines, but you’ll never get anything more than a few loose concepts that are completely up to interpretation.

So when AI is trained on Disney, and it outputs something that is satire, commentary, or derivative, is that fair use? Does fair use apply to AI like it does to people? (Keeping in mind that fair use doesn’t stop corporations from suing regular people every day.)

In the latest legal battles, the right of AI to be trained on copyrighted works has so far been preserved. Because what AI spits out is “transformative”. If I use Mickey Mouse to sell my daycare, that’s theft. But if I use the character to make a satirical point about how Disney employs more lawyers than animators, that could be fair use.

Personally, I love transformative work. It’s how we speak our minds in the modern era.

But our desire to transform shouldn’t end at copyrighted works. It should extend to our use of AI itself.

One use of AI is just copying its outputs and saying “good enough for me!”

But it’s far better to take the outputs of AI and transform them into something new. Something uniquely ours.