The Right Way To Write With AI

Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you own it.

Language is an open-source operating system for communication. Words and sentences are like lines of code. No one owns, or is known for any individual word or letter. No one owns the letter “C” and no one owns the word “Catastrophe.” No one owns the name “Cole!” There are many people in the world named Cole. So despite these four letters, combined into a word, acting as my name representing my human identity, I do not own the name Cole. And if I write, “My name is Cole,” and someone else writes, “My name is Cole,” he is not plagiarizing me and I am not plagiarizing him.

(Which is why we are all assigned Social Security Numbers.)

No person, or company, or government owns the alphabet. Nor do they own the vast majority of the words created from that alphabet. Nor do they own the vast majority of the sentences we speak and write that are strings of the open-source words derived from our open-source alphabet. The same is true for software. No one owns the line of code responsible for processing a payment, or changing the background color of a webpage.

So, where does ownership come from?

How do you know when something you’ve written, or said, or thought, is yours?