Who owns the art that AI creates?
When an AI trained on millions of artworks creates something new, the copyright question becomes a legal minefield.
The answer
AI and copyright has become one of the most contested legal battlegrounds in tech. In 2023, a US federal court ruled in Thaler v. Perlmutter that AI-generated art without human authorship cannot be copyrighted. Meanwhile, multiple class-action lawsuits - including cases by artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt - allege that training AI on copyrighted works constitutes infringement. The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023 for using its articles to train GPT models. The EU AI Act requires disclosure of copyrighted training data. In early 2025, courts were still grappling with whether AI training constitutes fair use, with decisions expected to reshape copyright law worldwide. Japan took a notably permissive stance, ruling that AI training on copyrighted data is generally legal.
Source: US Copyright Office
- copyright
- intellectual property
- legal
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