Law360 Canada (August 13, 2026, 12:59 PM EDT) --

Connie L. Braun

Speed has dominated how we talk about artificial intelligence. AI can generate an image in seconds, draft a song before lunch or produce a dozen variations of a story without getting tired. AI can make artistic production faster and more accessible, but the arts have never been valuable simply because they are difficult to produce. We value them because someone chose to make them, because a human being noticed something, felt something and found a way to share it. With AI becoming more capable, human skills behind art do not disappear. They become easier to see, and, increasingly, easier to defend, since copyright itself now turns on identifying the human contribution in a work.

Good judgment becomes more important than technique alone

When anyone can generate a polished image, melody or paragraph, technical execution becomes less scarce. Judgment does not. Artists must still decide what is worth making. They must recognize when a work feels honest, when an idea is merely fashionable and when something that is technically impressive is emotionally empty. They need the acumen to distinguish a meaningful choice from an attractive default. AI can offer thousands of possibilities, but abundance creates a new challenge; someone must choose.

The artist becomes more than maker, moving into the realm of editor, curator and director. This makes good judgment one of the defining artistic skills of the AI era going beyond appreciation for beautiful things to a practiced sensitivity to meaning, context, form and consequence. Good judgment develops through attention, through reading deeply, looking carefully, listening widely and making enough imperfect work to understand why certain choices matter.

Lived experience cannot be automated

AI can imitate the patterns of grief, joy, desire, loneliness or belonging, but it does not live through them. It can generate a song about losing a parent without remembering the sound of a particular voice or paint migration without ever having left a home behind. Artists need not work autobiographically. The point is that human experience gives art its stakes, shaping even the most fantastical work through what its creator fears, values and remembers. In a world filled with synthetic content, audiences may be drawn to work grounded in a real point of view. The questions will be, “Is this good?” and “Why did someone need to make this?”

Empathy becomes a creative advantage

Art is an act of attention directed toward other people. A novelist imagines lives beyond their own. An actor enters another person’s emotional reality. A designer anticipates how an audience will feel and behave. A musician senses when a room needs energy, stillness, tension or release. These are human skills focusing on empathy, curiosity, listening, interpretation and emotional awareness.

AI can analyze audience patterns, but data is different from understanding. People are inconsistent. We say one thing and mean another. We bring private memories into public experiences. We respond to tone, timing, trust and cultural context in ways that cannot be reduced to a prompt. Artists who understand people will be able to use AI more effectively than those who merely understand the tool. Artists will know what to ask for, what to reject and what needs to be changed so that the final work has the capacity to reach people.

Courage matters more when creation is easy

The easier it becomes to generate something reasonable, the more valuable it becomes to make something risky. AI systems are often strongest at producing recognizable forms such as an image that looks cinematic, a song that resembles a familiar genre or prose that sounds appropriately polished. We must recognize, however, that art does not move forward through competence alone. It moves forward when someone makes an unexpected choice and accepts the possibility that it may fail. That requires courage.

Human artists can challenge prevailing tastes, expose uncomfortable truths and create work before an audience knows how to receive it. They can make something awkward, excessive, unsettling or strange because those qualities serve a deeper purpose. In the age of AI, originality may depend less on producing everything by hand and more on having the confidence to pursue an idea that is not justified by averages.

Collaboration becomes part of the art

The future of art is unlikely to be a contest between humans and machines. Instead, the future will be shaped by how people choose to work with new tools and with one another. AI can help artists explore unfamiliar techniques, test compositions, translate ideas across media or overcome practical barriers. A filmmaker with limited resources can visualize a scene. A musician can experiment with arrangements. A writer can interrogate different structures before finding the right one. Meaningful collaboration still depends on distinctly human abilities in the form of communicating an intention, giving thoughtful feedback, negotiating differences, taking responsibility and building trust. The tool may participate in the process, but people determine the values that guide it.

Copyright rewards the human contribution

Copyright law has always rested on a human premise. Protection attaches to original expression that originates with an author, a premise that is now being tested. Courts and copyright offices in Canada and elsewhere are drawing a line between what a system generates and what a person shapes, and the emerging answer is consistent. The parts conceived, selected, arranged, and revised by a human are the parts the law will protect. Output from a prompt alone sits on uncertain ground, which makes authorship not only an artistic claim but an evidentiary one.

This changes how careful artists work. Keeping a record of drafts, prompts and decisions is becoming part of the craft, because the record is what demonstrates the human contribution. Questions run the other way, too: models are trained on existing works and artists may fairly ask how their catalogues were used, what they licensed and what attribution they are owed.

Copyright, then, is not a side issue to the creative questions raised here. It is the legal expression of the same idea where the value of a work traces back to the person who made the choices behind it.

The artist’s role is expanding

As AI advances, artists may spend less time on repetitive tasks. That does not diminish the artist. It does, however, shift the centre of the work. Value lies increasingly in framing the question, setting the vision, recognizing what is missing and making choices that carry emotional and ethical weight. Drawing, composing, writing and performing still matter, alongside paying attention, developing judgment, understanding people and standing behind a point of view. AI may generate an artifact … a human being turns it into an expression.

Now is not the time to prove that people can outperform machines. It is to remember why we create at all. Art helps us understand what it feels like to be alive, especially when life changes faster than we can comfortably explain. That need will not fade as AI grows more powerful. It will grow stronger. Artists who cultivate their humanity will become essential for their empathy, courage, curiosity, judgment and a capacity for wonder; they will not become obsolete.

Connie L. Braun is a product adoption and learning consultant with LexisNexis Canada.
 
The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s firm, its clients, Law360 Canada, LexisNexis Canada or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is neither intended to be nor should be taken as legal advice.

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