I keep watching my friends who are professional creatives get upset about this topic and I get it, I really do, but I want to say something that might land badly. We in academia have been fighting this exact fight since the first student leaned over and copied their neighbor’s paper. Plagiarism is not a new problem. Attribution is not a new problem. People profiting off other people’s work without credit is not a new problem and frankly anyone who thinks it is has not spent much time in a classroom.

I am a professional academic. I watch students use AI for research every day and not cite a single thing. I cannot stop them from using the tool but what I can do is make them cite every idea in a paper. Every single one. If you cannot show me how you arrived at an idea and trace it back to something real, I am not giving you a degree that lets you profit off other people’s thinking. That is the line I hold and it is the same line I am drawing here.

Generative AI is worth defending, just not for the reasons most people argue about. The real case is personal use and it is a better case than people give it credit for. I cannot put a researcher, editor, and collaborator on retainer. Nobody can unless they are rich. And even if I could, a professional is not going to sit with me at midnight chasing a half formed idea down a rabbit hole, they are not going to drop everything because I need to figure out if a plot point holds together or brainstorm fifty versions of the same concept until something finally clicks. That is just not how any of that works.

I want this technology to exist. I genuinely do. But I also want it to be fair and right now it is not, and because it is not fair I do not use it for anything I would put my name on. I want to. That is the honest answer. I want to use it the way it is meant to be used and feel good about it and I am just not there yet.

These companies are profitable. Very profitable. The people whose work trained the models are not seeing any of that and that needs to change. I also want citations without having to ask for them because everything comes from somewhere and I want to chase it. If a story hook or an image style came from something I want to find that thing. I want to read the book, find the artist, go down that whole rabbit hole. Right now the tool just hands me an output like it fell out of the sky and that is not good enough. And if I ever take something beyond personal use I should be legally on the hook to cite sources and pay up. That framework does not exist yet and nobody with anything to lose seems to be in a hurry to build it.

Here is the thing though. This djinn is out of the bottle and nobody is putting it back. That conversation is over. What is not over is who profits and who gets left behind, and right now the people with Walt Disney money can protect their intellectual property while everyone else is just out here hoping for the best. We need new ways to defend creative work that do not require a legal team and a hundred years of brand equity and we needed them yesterday.

I am not asking for the technology to go away. I am asking for the people who built the foundation it stands on to get treated fairly. That is not complicated. It is just right.