The ethics of using AI-generated images for commercial purposes.

[Develofuche]

Is it morally acceptable to use AI-generated images for commercial purposes without crediting the original creators or obtaining permission? How does copyright law apply to images created by artificial intelligence?

[AndyJ]

Let me try and answer your second question first.

A work generated entirely by AI would probably not be protected by copyright. This is because under UK, US and EU law the creator of a work for copyright purposes must be a human being. UK law does make provision in section 9(3) of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 for the authorship of certain computer-generated works of literature, drama, music or art to be ascribed to the (human) person who makes the arrangements necessary for the creation of the works. However there has been no test case so far to see if merely entering prompts into an AI machine constitute the sort of preparatory arrangements envisaged by Parliament.

Clearly at the time this provision was enacted in August 1989 AI as we know it today did not exist. It is reasonable to assume that what the legislators had in mind at the time the law was drafted was, for example, wordprocessing and image manipulation programs such as Word and Photoshop, where the human user was responsible for almost all of the creative input necessary to produce a computer-generated output.

So with this in mind, if the person who initiated the AI generated image is claiming to own the copyright in the output of the AI it must be presumed, at least initially, that he or she is relying on section 9(3), and so using that work without first obtaining permission may leave you open to a claim for copyright infringement. If that same person also asserts his/her right to a credit (per sections 77 and 78 CDPA) as the author of the work, they are entitled to try to enforce their moral right to a credit. In both cases, it would then be up to a court to decide whether both claims were valid.