Your team used AI to draft the blog post driving your best traffic. Your designer used AI to generate the lifestyle images on your landing page. Your last ad campaign came out of a prompt with a few edits before it shipped. If a competitor lifts the image and runs it in their own ad, can you stop them? Maybe not.
This year the law got a lot clearer on why. Copyright has always required a human author. What is new is how firmly that is now applied to AI output. The Copyright Office says purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable — no human author, no protection. Thaler v. Perlmutter tested this all the way up: the D.C. Circuit affirmed the human-authorship rule, and the Supreme Court declined to review it this spring. That question is about as settled as it gets.
The harder question is what happens when a human is involved but AI did most of the work — which is the way that most companies produce content. Someone prompts it, edits it, rearranges it, builds on it.
What surprises most people, though, is that a detailed prompt does not count as authorship, no matter how creative the prompt is. Prompting describes what you want. It does not give you the creative control over the actual output that copyright protects.
What does count is what happens after — did a human select from a batch and arrange it deliberately? Substantially edit it? Combine it with original material? Make deliberate creative choices that shaped the final piece? Authorship is evaluated case by case. The more your team’s fingerprints are on the final version, the stronger your copyright claim.
If your content is mostly AI output with light touch-ups, you probably do not have an enforceable copyright in it. A competitor copying it is not infringing anything — there is nothing to infringe, and you cannot register the output with the Copyright Office with any confidence.
If your team is substantially editing and building on AI drafts, you are on better footing — but you need to be able to show that work: save edit history; keep earlier drafts; and document your selection and arrangement decisions.
Trademark protection for our AI output is different. Your brand name and logo are protected based on whether they function as a source identifier in commerce, not on who or what drew them. An AI-generated logo can still be a strong, registrable trademark.
Since your AI-assisted content may, or may not, be protectable, make sure that for any materials that are essential to your business — core brand assets, flagship content — that you document human creative decisions. It is not enough that human authorship is implied.
Have you looked at which of your content actually has a human author behind it?