Can You Copyright It?
The short answer in the United States, and broadly similar in the UK, EU and elsewhere: a work produced by AI *on its own* cannot be copyrighted, because copyright requires a human author. A work in which you made substantial creative contributions can be — and it is protected to the extent of what you contributed.
Where this stands in 2026. The Supreme Court declined to review Thaler v. Perlmutter in March 2026, leaving in place the appellate ruling affirming the Copyright Office's human-authorship requirement. That question is settled: AI cannot be an author.
What remains open — and is being worked out case by case — is exactly how much human involvement is enough.
The useful way to think about it. A prompt alone is generally treated as an idea, and ideas aren't protected. But when you use these tools the way you'd use a camera or a brush — making sustained creative choices about the result — you are contributing protectable expression. Practically, that means:
- Typing a prompt and downloading the first result → weakest position, likely unprotectable
- Extensive iteration, selection, masked editing and composition → considerably stronger
- Your own sketch, photograph or linework as the structural basis → stronger again; the underlying drawing is yours outright
- AI elements composited into a larger work you built → your arrangement and your original elements are protected
Keep records — this is the concrete, actionable part. If you ever need to demonstrate authorship, contemporaneous evidence of your process is what does it. Keep:
- Prompts and how they evolved, and why
- Outputs you rejected, and what was wrong with them
- Your own source material — sketches, photos, references
- Screenshots or layered files showing masking, editing and compositing
- Notes on the decisions you made at each stage
This is the prompt journal from the iteration section, doing a second job. It costs almost nothing to maintain and is impossible to reconstruct afterwards.