As a business owner, you may sometimes need to use artwork in your marketing materials or packaging. For instance, perhaps you own a brewery and hire artists to create different labels for various beverages. These labels are an important part of your branding, and you don’t want another company to use them.
However, the development of AI has changed things. You have started to create your own artwork using artificial intelligence. You come up with the idea and type out the prompt, and the AI then creates artwork that aligns with your vision. You can continue to update the prompt or refine it until you get the exact artwork you want.
You’re still planning to use this artwork for the same branding purposes, so can you copyright it? After all, you don’t want another business to simply begin taking the images you’ve generated.
There is no human creator
In reality, though, you can’t copyright AI-generated artwork. The reasoning here is that part of the qualification for a copyright is that the art needs to have a human creator. You either need to create it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, compensating them so that you are the owner of that artistic work.
With AI, however, the government believes that the human element is missing. Even though you are the one typing in the prompts and coming up with the ideas for your images, you are not directly creating them yourself. Instead, the artificial intelligence is generating the artwork, often by combining other images found on the internet. As a result, you can’t copyright these creations, and you do not own them in the same sense.
The rise of AI has led to many questions about copyrights, trademarks and the use of intellectual property. It’s important for you to understand what legal steps to take when navigating this ever-changing technological landscape.