Can you copyright AI art? The US rules for makers who sell it

Can AI art be copyrighted?

Art made only by typing prompts into an image generator cannot be copyrighted in the US. The Copyright Office's position is that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. When a tool turns a prompt into an image, the Office says the traditional elements of authorship are determined and executed by the technology, not the human user.

Its Part 2 report on copyrightability, published January 29, 2025, goes further: prompts do not alone provide sufficient control. Repeatedly revising prompts does not change this analysis, and the time, expense, or effort involved in creating a work by revising prompts is irrelevant. Rerolling the same prompt many times does not make you the author of the result.

AI art that includes real human work is a different case. The same report says does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output when AI is used to assist rather than stand in for human creativity. Copyright then covers the human parts only, and the Office decides how much of a work qualifies analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

What Thaler v. Perlmutter decided about AI copyright law

Thaler v. Perlmutter is a federal appeals court ruling on AI art copyright in the US. Stephen Thaler applied to register a picture called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, made by his AI system, the Creativity Machine. His application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author. The Copyright Office denied it, and Thaler sought review in federal district court, which sided with the Office.

The US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided his appeal on March 18, 2025 and also sided with the Office. Its holding: the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. A machine cannot be the author of a copyrighted work.

The court also limited what it decided. It said does not prohibit copyrighting work that was made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence. It did not rule on whether Thaler himself could be the author for building and using the machine, because that argument was waived before the agency. So the case settles that AI cannot be listed as the author. How much human input is enough is left to the Copyright Office's case-by-case review.

What a real registration of an AI-assisted work covered

The Copyright Office describes one registration in its Part 2 report: Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book that combined human-written text with images made in Midjourney. The Office registered the text and the human selection and arrangement of the images and text, not images generated by Midjourney.

For a maker this is the pattern to expect. A book, a zine or a print set that you wrote, laid out and sequenced can be protected for those parts. The individual AI images inside it stay unprotected, so another seller who copies one of those images on its own is likely not copying the parts you can protect.

How to register AI-assisted work with the US Copyright Office

These steps follow the Copyright Office's registration guidance for works containing AI-generated material, effective March 16, 2023. They apply to a print, a pattern or a design that mixes your own work with AI output.

1. Use the Standard Application

   Applicants with AI material in a work the Standard Application rather than the simpler single-author form. The Standard Application fee for electronic filing is $65.

2. Name yourself, never the tool

   List the human author. Applicants should not list an AI technology or the company that provided it as an author or co-author.

3. Describe what you made

   Give a brief statement in the Author Created field that describes your contribution, such as hand-drawn line art, painted color, or the selection and arrangement of images in a pattern repeat.

4. Exclude the AI material

   AI-generated content that is more than de minimis should be explicitly excluded. Do this in the Limitation of the Claim section, Other field, under Material Excluded, with a short description such as background textures generated by an AI tool.

5. Say so if you are unsure

   If you do not know how to split the work, you can give a general statement that a work contains AI-generated material.

6. Fix older registrations

   If you already registered a work without disclosing AI material, correct the record by submitting a supplementary registration. Applicants who leave it uncorrected risk losing the benefits of the registration.

Why disclosing AI on a copyright application matters

The guidance says applicants have a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content. Material generated by AI is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

Disclosure does not cancel your claim to the human parts. In those cases only protect the human-authored aspects of the work. What it prevents is a registration that claims more than you made. Applicants who do not correct such a record risk losing the benefits of the registration.

Can you sell AI art if it is not copyrighted?

Copyright law does not stop you from selling AI art. Copyright decides who can stop others from copying a work. An image with no copyright can still be printed and sold, but anyone else can copy and sell the same image, and you have no copyright claim against them.

Selling AI-generated images brings other checks that sit outside copyright registration:

• Platform rules. Marketplaces set their own rules on AI-made listings and how they must be labelled.
• The AI tool's terms of service. They set what you may do with outputs, including commercial use.
• Other people's work. An output that copies a recognisable character, logo or artist's piece can infringe their rights, whatever tool made it.
• Your own claims to buyers. Do not describe AI-generated work as hand-drawn or one of a kind if it is not.

If you want a protectable product line, put your own work into the parts buyers recognise: hand-drawn motifs, your own lettering, your repeat layout, or a painted finish over a generated base.

AI generated images copyright for prints, designs and patterns

Example: three makers sell the same kind of floral wall print. These cases apply the Copyright Office's rules to them; they are illustrations, not rulings.

• Maker A types a prompt, picks the best of twenty outputs and prints it. Nothing in the print is protected, because prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.
• Maker B paints the flowers in watercolor, scans them and uses an AI tool to remove paper texture. The painting is protected; the cleanup is assistive use.
• Maker C generates single flower motifs, redraws them by hand and builds a seamless repeat pattern. The redrawing and the repeat arrangement can be claimed, and the original AI motifs are excluded on the application.

Copyright law is federal, so the human authorship test is the same in every US state. Contracts, platform policies and the laws of other countries do vary, and courts may still refine where the line sits. This page is general information, not legal advice. For a specific product line or a dispute, talk to a copyright attorney.

Where Nation fits

Questions about AI art copyright