AI-Generated Content and Copyright: Who Owns What When a Machine Helps Create It

A marketing director generates a set of product images with an AI tool, drops them into a campaign, and later wants to stop a competitor from lifting the same visuals for their own ads. A novelist uses an AI assistant to draft transitional scenes, then tries to register the finished book. A musician trains a vocal model on years of his own recordings after losing his voice to illness, and needs to know if the resulting songs belong to him. Each of these situations runs into the same question the U.S. Copyright Office has spent the last few years working through: AI-generated content and copyright ownership don't follow the same rules people assume.

The short version is that copyright still requires a human author, but that rule is more nuanced in practice than it sounds, and the details of how a tool was used often decide the outcome.

Where the Human Authorship Line Actually Sits

The Copyright Office's position, laid out across its 2023 registration guidance and its 2025 report on generative AI copyrightability, is that a work generated purely by a machine with no human creative control cannot be registered. The Office reaffirmed this after Dr. Stephen Thaler tried to register an image his AI system produced entirely on its own, listing the machine as the author. Courts sided with the Office at every level, and the Supreme Court declined to take up the case in early 2026, leaving the human authorship requirement intact.

Typing a prompt and accepting whatever the model produces doesn't count as authorship, because the expressive choices, the exact rendering, composition, and detail, are being made by the system rather than the person. The Office has explained that complex AI models are inherently unpredictable, so a person entering the same prompt twice might get two different results, which signals a lack of the kind of control copyright law expects from an author.

What Actually Does Qualify for Protection

The distinction that matters is whether AI functioned as a tool assisting a human creative vision or as a replacement for it. A photographer using Photoshop to edit an image doesn't lose authorship over the edited photo. The Office treats certain AI uses the same way. When a human selects, arranges, or substantially modifies AI-generated material with real creative judgment, the resulting work, or at least the human-authored portions of it, can be registered.

A useful real-world example involves country artist Randy Travis, who lost most of his ability to sing after a stroke. His team trained an AI vocal model on his existing recordings and used it to convert another singer's performance into Travis's voice for a new song. The Copyright Office registered the work, because the AI was functioning as a tool carrying out a human creative team's vision rather than generating independent expression on its own. That distinction, tool versus author, is the one to watch.

A graphic novel combining human-written text with AI-generated images offers the opposite lesson. The Office registered the book but specifically excluded the individual AI-generated images from protection, since arranging existing generated images into a story isn't the same as creating the images themselves.

What This Means for Businesses Using AI Tools

Companies building marketing materials, product content, or creative assets with AI tools need to think about ownership before they build a business around the output. If a design was generated by AI with minimal human input beyond a prompt, nobody owns the specific visual, meaning a competitor can copy it without infringing anything. Businesses relying on AI-assisted work should document the human contribution as it happens, keep records of edits, selections, and creative decisions made after generation, and disclose the AI involvement honestly on any copyright application, since the Office requires that disclosure and has denied applications where it wasn't provided.

Contracts matter here too. A brand hiring a freelancer or agency that uses AI tools should spell out who owns the resulting content and confirm the freelancer isn't submitting purely machine-generated material without disclosing it, since a copyright claim built on an undisclosed AI foundation can unravel later.

Registering Work That Mixes Human and AI Contributions

Applicants registering a work containing AI-generated material have to identify the human author, use the standard application, and describe the human contribution in the application itself. The Office reviews these on a case-by-case basis, and a registration obtained without proper disclosure can be challenged or corrected through a supplementary filing. Getting this right at the outset avoids a registration that looks solid until someone actually tests it.

Where This Is Headed

The law here isn't fully settled, and the Copyright Office has acknowledged that its analysis could shift if AI tools evolve to give users more direct control over expressive output. For now, the safest approach treats AI as a drafting or editing tool rather than a stand-in for the creative work itself. If your business relies on AI-assisted content and you need clarity on what you actually own, or you're facing a dispute over material generated with these tools, the intellectual property attorneys at Braslow Legal can help you sort through the ownership questions AI-generated content and copyright law raise before they turn into a costly problem.