AI can be a powerful tool for many different tasks, including making marketing materials or branding content for a business. For example, perhaps you recently decided to start a business and needed a logo. You used AI to generate a few different options, and then you and your business partner decided which one to use.
But because this logo is now important to your branding, you may be wondering if you can copyright it. After all, you wrote the prompt that generated the image. It was designed specifically for your business. It contains elements you may consider part of your branding, such as the color scheme or certain images. Are you able to copyright it and protect this intellectual property so someone else doesn’t use it?
Human authorship is required
The short answer is no, you cannot copyright something you made with AI, at least not at this time. It is an emerging technology, so things could change in the future. But as of now, copyrights are prohibited for AI-generated content because there is no human authorship. A person didn’t create the content, so it cannot be copyrighted.
Moreover, AI itself is somewhat controversial when it comes to intellectual property rights. Many artists claim that using AI to generate these types of results violates their rights because artificial intelligence was trained on artwork that was already created by human artists.
This can make it a very complex situation. It’s important for you to understand all of the legal options you have at this time.