The writer is a senior partner at William Fry and a member of Ireland’s AI Advisory Council

Generative artificial intelligence poses two copyright puzzles. The first is the widely discussed question of compensation for work used to train AI models. The second, which has yet to receive as much attention, concerns the work that AI produces. Copyright is granted to authors. So what happens to work that has no human author? 

The US has drawn the clearest line in the sand to date. In 2023 the US Copyright Office granted copyright protection to the graphic novel Zarya of the Dawn but rescinded protection for any AI-generated images — protecting only the human-authored text and arrangement. More definitively, a federal appeals court ruled in March that the pretty, purple and green AI-generated artwork “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” could not receive copyright protection because works must be “authored in the first instance by a human being”. The message is unambiguous: AI prompts, however sophisticated, are not enough alone to warrant authorship.