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Fear of being found out to soon

I used to think my ideas needed protecting the way a ship protects cargo — locked below deck, papers filed, lawyers on retainer. I was reluctant for years to put my real thinking out into the world, because I was afraid someone with more capital, more technology, more reach than me would simply take it.

Here’s what changed my mind.

Intellectual property was never really the paper. It was never the trademark filing or the courtroom exhibit. It was the origin — the moment a thing first existed, traceable back to the person who made it exist. Every idea has a point of origin. I’d argue that point of origin is the intellectual property, and AI hasn’t erased that — it’s made it more visible than any institution ever could. Every post, every draft, every earlier version carries a timestamp back to a source. That’s evidence. That’s testimony. You could put me on a stand and I could articulate exactly what I envisioned for WeSee, when, and why — the H between “We” and “See,” my kids’ names folded into it, the whole architecture of it. That’s my human agency on the record.

I’m not just saying this on faith. The U.S. Copyright Office made this close to official policy last year — when human authors modify, arrange, or select AI-generated material in a way that meets the standard of originality, the result is copyrightable, with protection extending to the expressive material the human contributed. The AI didn’t erase authorship. It sharpened the question of who actually did the authoring — and the record of that is still yours to make.

There’s a whole industry quietly building the infrastructure for exactly what I’m describing. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, backed by Adobe, the New York Times, BBC, Microsoft and others, exists to give creators a way to claim authorship while giving everyone else a way to verify what’s true. That’s not a courtroom. That’s a standard, built for exactly the fear I used to carry — that origin wouldn’t count for anything against someone bigger than me.

So the fear that’s kept me — kept a lot of us — quiet, waiting in the shadows before we’re “ready,” is a fear built on the old model. The one where institutions decided what counted as proof. We don’t need that gatekeeper anymore. We need to start creating.

I’m not naive about it. Someone could still take an idea further than I currently can — more capital, more technology, a faster runway. That’s real. But that’s a different problem than the one I used to worry about. That’s competition. What I used to fear was erasure — that my origin wouldn’t count for anything. It counts. Source data doesn’t get entangled and lost inside a third party, even one as vast as AI. If anything, AI and intellectual property are going to have to learn to work together, because the record of origin is now easier to establish, not harder.

So if you’ve got something that could move an industry, a symbol, a name, a reason behind it — don’t wait for permission from an institution that isn’t going to give it to you. Start posting. Start building the record yourself.

WEHSEE

🌚☄️❤️💫

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Sources

U.S. Copyright Office, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability” (January 29, 2025). https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). https://c2pa.org

SSL.com, “Upcoming AI Regulation Deadlines: Can You Prove Your Content Is Real?” https://www.ssl.com/article/upcoming-ai-regulation-deadlines-how-to-prove-your-content-is-real/

OpenOrigins, “What Is Digital Content Provenance and Why It Matters in 2026.” https://openorigins.com/insights/blog/what-is-digital-content-provenance