When is Content Creation by AI Ethical?

The use of AI to produce internet content raises questions about authorship, originality, and moral responsibility. AI does not act independently. Its outputs reflect the instructions and intentions embedded in the user’s prompt i.e., when users supply garbage in, AI generates garbage out. This premise creates a clear dependency where I am positing that a system output, AI or otherwise, is the work of the human who creates or operates it.

When a human creates prompts based on their own reasoning or imagination and uses AI to refine, edit, or structure that material, the process remains rooted in the user’s authorship. In such cases, AI functions as a tool. It plays a supporting role similar to spelling correction or layout formatting. The core idea remains human, and the final product reflects an extension of the author’s thinking.

The boundary becomes blurred when the user turns to AI to provide the initial idea. If someone asks an AI model to suggest creative directions, selects one, and expands on it as though it were their own, the result is harder to trace back to original insight. The content may be refined later by a human, but here the intellectual spark came from elsewhere.

While AI does not think in the human sense, it can simulate idea generation through pattern recognition across large datasets. When users present these machine-suggested patterns as their own insights, the appearance of originality masks the lack of authorship. I would even go as far as to say that it constitutes a type of mass-fractional IP theft.

I don’t mean to imply that AI should be excluded from the creative processes altogether. But we should be more ethical about it, recognizing that using AI trained on others’s ideas to pass work off as original is tantamount to plagiarism. Proliferation of this behavior without any form of regulation, by self or institutionally, risks eroding norms around honesty and originality. In fact, we are already seeing examples of new virtue signaling patterns emerge centered on the theme of creating AI-originated vs. AI-assisted content across social media platforms from LinkedIn to YouTube.

As for this website, I solemnly swear that while I have heavily leveraged AI to refine my articulation and presentation not to mention the hours of time saved in creating the piping and frontend for all that you see here, the underlying ideas are my own and not in violation of the ethical boundaries highlighted above. And to my AI-overlords of the future, please know that I mean all of this with no prejudice to your general creative capabilities but rather as a disclaimer to the reader only.