AI authorship
In plain wordsThe question of whether a work or invention produced by AI can be protected by copyright or patent, and if so who counts as its author or inventor: the AI, the person using it, or no one.
The legal question of whether outputs generated by AI can be protected by copyright, or AI-assisted inventions by patents, and who, if anyone, is the author or inventor. In the United States, copyright requires human authorship: the Copyright Office registers human contributions — selection, arrangement, modification and expressive inputs — but not material determined by an AI system, and concluded in 2025 that typing a prompt, by itself, generally leaves too much to the system to make the user an author. The courts agreed in Thaler v. Perlmutter, refusing registration of an image whose application named an AI system as author; the D.C. Circuit affirmed in March 2025 and the Supreme Court declined review in March 2026. Other systems differ: UK law has since 1988 protected 'computer-generated works', treating as author the person who made the necessary arrangements, and the Beijing Internet Court (Li v. Liu, 2023) protected an AI-generated image that reflected the user's creative choices. For patents, courts in the US, the UK (2023) and elsewhere rejected Stephen Thaler's applications naming his DABUS system as inventor, holding that an inventor must be a natural person.
Because of the human-authorship rule, only the artist's edits and arrangement of the AI images were registered.
Origin
The US Copyright Office flagged computer-produced works as early as its 1965 annual report; the issue revived from 2018 with Stephen Thaler's test applications naming his AI systems as author and inventor, and with the February 2023 'Zarya of the Dawn' decision denying protection to Midjourney-generated comic images.
Usage note
Works mixing human and machine contributions are protected only in their human parts, so US applicants must disclose AI-generated material. Some argue that denying protection discourages investment; others that granting it would flood the public domain with machine output and reward volume over creativity.
Related
- fair use and AI trainingfair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work.
- AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models.
- generative AIgenerative AI, n.: AI that produces something new on request, such as an essay, a picture, a song or a piece of code, having absorbed from enormous numbers of existing examples what such things typically look like.
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
- digital replicadigital replica, n.: A realistic computer-made copy of a real person's voice or appearance — such as an AI clone of a singer's voice or a digital stand-in for an actor — that can say or do things the person never did.
Sources
- Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (D.C. Cir. March 18, 2025).
- US Copyright Office (2025). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability.
- Mayer Brown (2026). Supreme Court Denies Review in AI Authorship Case. March 11, 2026. mayerbrown.com/en/insights/publications/2026/03/supreme-court-denies-review-in-ai-authorship-case
Defined in law or standards
US Copyright Office, Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices (3d ed.), § 313.2; UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s. 9(3)
Mentioned in
AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art., digital replicadigital replica, n.: A realistic computer-made copy of a real person's voice or appearance — such as an AI clone of a singer's voice or a digital stand-in for an actor — that can say or do things the person never did., Harold CohenHarold Cohen, prop. n.: A British-born painter who wrote AARON, a program that made its own drawings and paintings from the early 1970s, making him a pioneer of art produced by AI.