Clara Mae Gregory

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When in doubt, check it out.

Copyright and AI

Written 2026-06-15

Under U.S. copyright law, works generated entirely by Artificial Intelligence are not copyright-exempt—they are not eligible for copyright protection at all.The legal realities of AI and copyright depend on whether you are talking about the outputs generated by AI or the sources used to train AI models:

1.
AI-Generated Outputs (What you create)Human Authorship Requirement: The U.S. Copyright Office mandates that copyright protection only applies to works created by human authors. Content produced solely by a machine with no significant human creative input cannot be copyrighted and essentially falls into the public domain.

Mixed Works: If you use AI to generate a rough draft or base image, but add substantial human creative input—such as complex human-authored edits, arrangements, or combinations with human-made material—those specific human-contributed elements can be copyrighted.

Liability: If the output generated by the AI tool infringes on an existing copyright, the business or individual utilizing the tool can be held legally liable.

2.
AI Training Sources (What the AI uses)

Fair Use Debate: Tech companies argue that using copyrighted works as data to train AI models falls under "fair use" (similar to how a search engine indexes pages).

Ongoing Litigation: Many human creators and publishers dispute this, arguing that ingesting millions of copyrighted works without permission or compensation is an infringement. The legality of this practice is currently being decided in various courts. Those using AI tools to create business materials, blog posts, or creative works, should understand that this legal landscape is critical. AI can help you check if in doubt. Provide the AI assistant with the information in question such as specific type of content you are producing (e.g., text, code, images) and what tools you are using can provide more tailored guidance or help identify what requires additional human editing to protect your rights.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/


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