The increasing use of generative AI tools has led to a surge in the creation of logos, marketing copy, product images, and jingles. However, the ownership of these works remains unclear. According to Prince Addoquaye Acquaye and Maud Boadu, businesses are using these tools without pausing to consider ownership. If the answer is no, the work falls into the public domain, allowing competitors to copy it freely.
The law does not recognize artificial intelligence as a legal person, and therefore, AI itself cannot own the copyright. Copyright belongs to authors, and an author has to be someone the law can treat as a holder of rights. Most developers agree that the terms of service of major AI tools assign rights to the user. However, a contract can only transfer rights that exist in the first place, and that is precisely what is in doubt.
Existing copyright law struggles to address the issue of ownership in AI-generated works. Copyright protects creative expression, not tools. A photographer owns copyright not because they possess a camera, but because they choose the composition, lighting, and framing. The camera records, while the photographer decides. Similarly, AI is a tool in someone's hands, and the courts have settled that human authorship is required.
The leading decision in Thaler v Perlmutter established that human authorship is required as a matter of statutory law. The U.S. Copyright Office refused registration for an artwork generated autonomously by a computer system, with no creative input from the user. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. This sets a precedent for the United States.
However, the situation becomes more complex when a person and an AI tool work together. The U.S. Copyright Office addressed this in January 2025, concluding that AI-assisted works can be protected if a human supplied the expression. Prompts alone are not enough, but creatively selecting and arranging AI-generated material, substantially modifying the output, or feeding in existing work can be sufficient.
The Copyright Office has registered an image titled A Single Piece of American Cheese, where the artist made dozens of deliberate edits to the composition using her tool's inpainting feature. The registration covered her selection, arrangement, and modifications, not the raw AI output. This sets a demanding standard, and most everyday uses of AI will fall short of it.
A potential solution is to adopt a human creative control standard, recognizing that copyright should not depend solely on whether AI was used but on the quality and significance of the human contribution. This approach would turn on questions such as who decided the structure and composition of the work and whether the person can explain their creative decisions.
Key points
- Human authorship is required for copyright protection in AI-generated works.
- The U.S. Copyright Office has established guidelines for AI-assisted works, emphasizing the need for human creative input.
- The debate surrounding copyright in AI-generated works is ongoing, with courts and regulatory bodies continuing to shape the landscape.
