Copyright is a form of protection provided by federal copyright laws to the authors of 'original works of authorship,' including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. The 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to authorize others to reproduce the work, prepare derivative works based upon the work, distribute copies of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, and perform or display the work publicly.
Currently, copyright protection is not granted to works created by AI tools in the U.S (ruling upheld by appeals court as of March 18, 2025). The U.S. Copyright Office has issued guidance that explains the requirement for human authorship to be granted copyright protection and provides information to creators working in tandem with AI tools on how to effectively and correctly register their works.
The permissibility of using AI-generated content in your projects, presentations, and publications may depend on the terms of use or terms and conditions of the AI tool. U.S. copyright law does not currently protect AI-generated material. If terms and conditions do not restrict use of generated content, you are generally free to use it. However, be aware that your intended platform, publication, or classroom policy may have their own restrictions on use or require attribution for AI-generated content.
Using generative AI to create derivative works can infringe on copyright. Before inputting copyrighted material into an AI tool as part of your prompt, you may need to obtain permissions.
Generative AI tools are trained on data collected from many sources, and some image and text tools have used web-scraped material without the website owners' consent or knowledge. Several law suits have been brought against AI image and text generation platforms that have used visual and text content created or owned by others as training material, claiming that the use of the content for training without permission is an infringement of copyright. Some experts have pointed to previous precedent in fair use cases to justify a fair use argument for this use of content for training data. While cases are ongoing, there is no definitive answer on whether the training of AI models in this manner is legally considered an infringement of copyright.