A Human Right to AI Remuneration? What Human Rights Law Tells Us Copyright Owes Creators

AI remuneration may be defended in the name of creators' human rights while leaving creators themselves with little or nothing. This article examines that tension through international human rights law, which protects creators' material interests without equating them with the transferable economic rights under copyright law. It argues that the current EU framework, based on the text and data mining exception and the possibility of licensing following rights reservations, cannot be assumed to protect original creators merely because it allows copyright owners to obtain remuneration. Proposed alternative remuneration mechanisms seek to address this problem by directing economic benefits more closely towards creators. But whether these alternatives genuinely protect creators' material interests is itself a question of human rights law, one that cannot be answered simply by pointing to the benefits they provide. Output-based levies may support the creative community without necessarily protecting the material interests of individual creators whose works were used in AI training; statutory or residual remuneration rights may yield individual payments too small to provide meaningful material protection. Human rights law offers no "magic" remuneration model, but calls for examining whose interests different mechanisms protect, how effectively, and whether individual and collective approaches can complement one another.