Who owns creativity in the age of AI?

When we set out to complete Beethoven's Tenth Symphony with artificial intelligence, the first question wasn't technical. It was moral. Who would own the result — the machine, the musicologists, the long-dead composer, or no one at all?

I've come to believe the question is the wrong way round. AI doesn't author; it accelerates. It can generate a thousand plausible continuations of a melody, but it cannot tell you which one carries meaning. That judgement — taste, restraint, the sense of when something is true — remains stubbornly human. In every project I've made with these tools, the technology widened the field of possibility and left the hardest decisions exactly where they had always been.

What worries me is not that machines will replace creators. It is that we will undervalue authorship at the precise moment it becomes most valuable. When anyone can generate, the scarce thing is intention — the reason a work exists at all. Europe in particular should treat creative intellectual property as strategic infrastructure, not as raw material to be scraped. The melody is cheap now. The meaning never was.

We finished Beethoven's symphony. We did not finish Beethoven. That difference is the whole job.