Who owns the art?

"I know so many painters who title their works after they've done them, which is a real giveaway, you know." — David Bowie, Inspirations (1997)

Bowie's not entirely right.

Today, it's easy to open a chat window with an LLM, describe the blog post you want to write, and have it spit out slop. Autocomplete. Send. Repeat.

The step toward better is to come up with a concept, write a draft, read through it, make some edits, and then take it to the LLM for suggestions. And perhaps the best work, like most pieces of writing, emerges through the editing process, which means you have to kill your darlings.

What I publish is often the tenth iteration of what I started. I know what I'm going to say at first, but not where it will end. I leave the door open. The piece evolves.

Which begs the question: If, after using the LLM, you keep only 10% or less, is the piece yours? You could retype the whole thing, and then what?

The reason the LLM's version might have felt usable to you isn't the prose. It's the structure—the order of beats, the placement of the pivot, the choice of where to end. That structure was worked out together through the back-and-forth.

And this hits on something important: Who does the art belong to?

The NYT bestseller certainly had an agent, a researcher, an editor, a publisher, plus technology—an army to help produce the work. Yet we have no problem putting the author's name on it, because they had the vision of what the book was supposed to be.

Because structure and prose are not the same thing.

The artist, like any designer, is about making choices—what goes in, what goes out. There are 26 letters in the alphabet and unlimited combinations of these symbols to create words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books.

Bowie believed artists are generally happier discussing the process of creating rather than trying to define what the artwork means. That's why painters title their works after they've done them—Bowie sees it as evidence of evasion. We're obsessed with how the work is made because, deep down, we're afraid. We're insecure as artists—and writers, designers, and coders are feeling it especially hard at the beginning of the AI era.

But this insecurity isn't new. Every artist can feel the fraud police right behind them, checking their work. Even the surgeon who moves from working on cadavers to live patients will feel like a fraud the first time.

Here's the thing: the invention of the internet vastly changed how research was done—no more encyclopedias or mandatory trips to the library. The laptop changed how fast we can type—no more jammed typewriters or yellow legal pads. Spell-check didn't stop people from being bashful about putting their name on a piece. And now we have LLMs, and the temptation is to fall back into that same insecurity.

The LLM is just scaffolding. The structure is what was co-created.

In the end, the art doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the piece.

Bowie is right that we name the process to cover our insecurity. But he's wrong to call the late title a giveaway. You need something to say. The blank page won't fill itself with meaning just because you showed up. But the meaning often arrives in the work, not before it.

The art is in the showing up and in having something to bring. The practice and the thread, together. That’s what gets named.