Does AI own this or do I?

By Steven Zapolski, Founder | ZNS Solutions

AI Content Creation

If someone challenged my ownership of the content I was creating with AI, what would I show them?

I didn't have a good answer. And when I went looking for a framework that did, I found out nobody had built one yet.

So I did.

This didn't start as a framework. It started as a recurring thought I couldn't shake. Driving the kids to school. Sitting in a meeting at work. Somewhere between my day job as an internal audit professional and building my consulting practice on the side, the same question kept showing up.

The Problem Is Bigger Than Most People Realize

I have spent twenty years in governance, risk, and compliance. I know what a documentation gap looks like and I know what it costs when it surfaces at the wrong moment. What I was seeing in the AI content space was one of the largest undocumented compliance gaps I had ever encountered, and it was sitting in plain sight across every industry, every platform, and every professional who had started using AI to create anything of value.

Millions of consultants, creators, journalists, and enterprise teams are producing content with AI assistance every single day. They are building businesses on it. They are staking their professional reputations on it. And most of them have no documentation trail that proves a human being made meaningful creative decisions that shaped the final work.

That matters because the U.S. Copyright Office has been clear: purely AI-generated content does not qualify for copyright protection. The question is not whether you used AI. The question is whether you can demonstrate that your expertise, your judgment, and your creative direction shaped what was produced. Without a documented process that question cannot be answered in your favor.

The Gap Nobody Is Filling

I went looking for an existing governance framework that addressed this. I know the landscape well: NIST, COSO, the IIA Standards, ISO 42001. Every one of them addresses AI governance from the outside in. They tell organizations how to govern the AI systems they deploy. Not one of them addresses the human being sitting in front of the tool trying to protect what they create with it.

NIST governs the system. IIA governs the audit. COSO governs the organization. Nobody governs the human. That's the gap. And for a GRC professional it was impossible to unsee once I saw it.

The Corporate Dimension Most Creators Are Ignoring

There's another layer to this that doesn't get talked about enough, and it hits closest to home for anyone who has a day job and a creative practice running simultaneously.

When you use your employer's AI tools, a corporate ChatGPT instance, Microsoft Copilot inside your company's Microsoft 365 environment, any employer-provisioned platform, to create content that has nothing to do with your job, you may have just given your employer a claim on that content without realizing it. Corporate licensing agreements and acceptable use policies often assert broad ownership over anything produced inside their environment. Most employees have never read those policies carefully enough to know where the line is.

If you are a consultant, a creator, or a practitioner with a side practice, and you are using corporate AI tools to do any of that work, you are operating in contested territory without a map.

I know because I am that consultant.

What I Built

The Human Authorship Evidence Standard, HAES, is a three prong governance doctrine built specifically for this gap. It addresses ownership, defense, and enforcement across the full intellectual property lifecycle of AI assisted work. It was built from a GRC foundation because this is fundamentally a compliance problem, not a legal one. And it was built for the individual creator and consultant first, because that is where the consequences are most personal and most immediate.

The full HAES doctrine is available as a whitepaper at ZNS Solutions. If you are a platform company interested in licensing discussions, or an organization that needs implementation support, reach out directly.

But if you are the consultant sitting in traffic wondering whether the framework you just built with AI actually belongs to you, this was written for you.

Compliance confidence starts with knowing what you own.

Download the HAES Whitepaper

http://znssolutions.com/haes

Steven Zapolski is the founder of ZNS Solutions, a GRC technology consulting practice based in Indianapolis. He brings twenty years of governance, risk, and compliance experience across Fortune 500 organizations, federal agencies, and internal audit practice.

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