Just sat in bed pondering after Mrs Crap had just shown me her latest "business idea", which included a range of logos and websites she got some ai to create for her. If it were to take off and be successful, who owns the IP on those designs? In the 36million pages of t's&C's that you no doubt have to agree to, they might reserve the right on anything generated by their particular ai model. So, you start a business, use AI to create the logo for your business and the website, the business takes off, goes on dragons den, and you end up making millions/billions. AI company then comes knocking and says "actually we own that logo, you need to pay us X as per the agreement you signed up to our service." Does that seem feasible? Or if you are granted copyright on the logo would that supercede any t's and C's that you agreed to, as local law takes president in these kinds of circumstances. Would they have to make it a copyright lawsuit of registration of IP they didn't own?
Nobody. Literally, nobody. US case law has already established that the act of intellectual property creation requires a human intellect. No human, no property. AI "art", AI text, AI code, AI patent applications, all forms of AI slop are entirely uncopyrightable under US law - and where the US leads, others follow. Remember that case of the photographer who handed a monkey his camera, and the monkey captured a selfie, and the photographer claimed he owned the copyright 'cos it was his camera? Yeah, same thing: if anyone held the copyright it was the monkey, but as the monkey isn't a human he can't by definition hold copyright and therefore the image is uncopyrightable. Nobody owns the rights to AI slop. Not the AI company, and not your wife.
What’s even more complicated is in those ‘design a logo’ websites. If you generate enough, you will see the patterns; the operator has written a prompt specifying common shapes and themes, and all the generator actually does is iterate those through. There might only be a few thousand basic combos even with the pre-set colour schemes. And of course you can edit it a bit. But in this system, most of the human input is actually the company who wrote the prompt. If copyright and trademark law coalesces around a “human in the loop” percentage as to how much work the person puts in, which is one of the competing arguments, well the company owning the website may end up owning the copyright. Another issue when you ask AI to generate you a logo is it pulls from all the other logos it was trained from and as business brand logs are almost exclusively copyright / trademarked … well the training data is an immediate infringement. Even right now what you’ve generated could be considered infringing the copyright of wherever it stole training data from. TL;DR yes, it is a minefield and someone could literally pop up and sue you for being infringing, and you won’t have a leg to stand on.
Oh this was more just a hypothetical, you don't have to worry about my wife. This is probably business idea 156, of which 156 have yet to leave the idea phase She's the same with hobbies; sees something on Instagram that looks cool, decides she wants to do it, does a little research and decides it actually looks a lot like hard work and and doesn't bother. Very glad AI can't hold copyrights, although probably doesn't bode well come judgement day
Tracing over the AI output yourself and making some small edits in a vector editor would (probably) be enough to let you copyright/trademark it. It would also give you some usable material since generative raster slop gives packaging companies nosebleeds.
An interesting grey area, tracing or copying an AI image. I'm actually not sure it would pass muster. If it was somebody else's work you copied by tracing, it would be copyright infringement; since the original image is uncopyrightable, does this exempt status transfer across to any direct copies? Like if you hand sketched from AI images as references, you're making art, but substantially you're mainly duplicating another piece of art - and it was uncopyrightable. Messy. My solution has been not to touch AI anything with a 10-foot pole, and it's working well for me so far. In an adjacent example, I used the clip art from LibreOffice in my business cards and branding. Still not sure where that leaves me. I'm probably breaking some clip art creator's open license by using them in a business context. But hey, tiny local businesses, nobody really gives a hoot - there's an Italian restaurant near me with Marlon Brando's face on the menus, so.
