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Right now, the U.S. Copyright Office says no one owns a purely AI-created work.

Under current law, copyright protection requires a human author. That means the striking image you generated in Midjourney, or the poetic masterpiece you coaxed out of ChatGPT, isn’t yours in the traditional legal sense. You can print it, sell it, even use it commercially — but if someone copies it, you can’t sue for infringement, because technically, there’s no author to protect.

This isn’t a small technicality — it’s a foundational issue in the age of AI creativity. Copyright law was built on a centuries-old assumption: that creation flows from human intellect and originality. But when a neural network trained on billions of images can produce something new in seconds, where does authorship really begin or end? Did you create the work by crafting the perfect prompt — or did the algorithm? Or was it the countless human artists whose works were fed into the model to make it capable in the first place?

In 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office doubled down on its stance, rejecting full copyright registration for AI-generated works, even when humans guided the process. Only pieces with substantial human creative input — meaning a person selected, arranged, or meaningfully modified the AI output — may qualify for partial protection. Think of it as a sliding scale: the more you shape and interpret what the AI gives you, the closer you get to traditional ownership.

Other countries are experimenting with different answers. The U.K., for example, extends authorship to “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” China has flirted with granting copyright protection to AI-generated art when it reflects sufficient human intention. It’s a global patchwork — and a potential legal minefield for creators, businesses, and innovators who rely on AI-assisted tools.

Beyond law, the ethical questions are just as tangled. If AI art floods the market, what happens to the value of human creativity? If your business logo or marketing materials come from a text-to-image model, are you comfortable knowing no one — including you — can truly claim ownership? And if AI one day becomes capable of independent creativity, would denying it legal authorship be as outdated as denying photographers rights to their photos in the 1800s?

The answers aren’t clear yet — but the debate is heating up fast.

As AI grows, the law’s racing to catch up — at Sturgeon Law, we'll keep you posted as it does.

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