ChatGPT and Copyright: Who Owns AI-Generated Content and How to Use It Legally?

Blog posts, social media images, advertising ideas — content created by artificial intelligence has become a part of our daily work. ChatGPT writes articles, and Midjourney creates stunning illustrations in seconds. But this has raised a fundamental question: who owns the rights to all of this? Can you safely use generated text on your commercial website? Who is the owner of an image created by your prompt?

The legal status of AI content is a “gray zone” full of risks and nuances. In this article, we will break down who actually owns the results of AI work, whether it can be used for business, and how to do so legally without infringing on the rights of others.

Section 1. Can Artificial Intelligence Be an Author?

Before discussing legal commercial use, we need to address the fundamental and perhaps most complex question: who is the author of text generated by ChatGPT or an image created by Midjourney? Your prompt? The neural network itself? The developer company? Or perhaps no one at all? The answer to this question lies at the very core of copyright doctrine and determines the entire subsequent legal status of AI content.

1.1. Why the Law Recognizes Only Humans as Authors

This is a key principle underlying modern copyright law in Ukraine, the USA, the EU, and most other countries: the author of a work can exclusively be a natural person (a human) whose creative labor produced the work. Therefore, to the question “can AI be an author?” the law currently gives a clear answer: no. This fundamental approach is the basis for any creator, and you can read more about the basics of copyright and its application in our full guide: “Copyright for Content Creators: A Complete Guide to Protecting Music, Courses, Videos, and Design“.

Why is this principle so immutable?

• Creativity as a purely human activity: the law views the process of creating a work (a book, painting, music) as the result of unique intellectual and creative activity of the human mind. It is a process involving intent, emotions, personal experience, a unique vision of the world, and free will. A machine, even the most complex neural network, does not “create” in the human sense. It executes a highly complex mathematical algorithm, analyzing massive datasets on which it was trained, and generates a result based on identified statistical patterns. It has no intent, inspiration, or “self.”
• AI as a tool: the most accurate legal analogy used by courts and patent offices is to treat artificial intelligence as an extremely advanced tool. A camera is not the author of a photograph — the photographer is, having chosen the angle, adjusted the lighting, composed the shot, and pressed the button. Photoshop is not the author of an illustration — the designer is, who used brushes, layers, and filters to realize their creative vision. Similarly, ChatGPT or Midjourney are tools you use to generate content.

For these reasons, the US Copyright Office has repeatedly refused to register works where artificial intelligence was listed as the author. This approach is currently dominant worldwide.

1.2. Who is the owner then: you, the developer, or no one?

If artificial intelligence cannot be an author, a logical confusion arises. Who then owns the rights to the generated text or image? There are three main theories, and the global legal community has not yet reached a final, unified consensus.

1. The owner is the AI developer (e.g., OpenAI): this theory suggests that rights belong to the company that created the neural network. However, the companies themselves usually reject this approach, as it would create massive legal problems and completely deter users. Furthermore, the company does not participate in the creation of each specific result, so its authorship is questionable.
2. The owner is the user who provided the prompt: this is the most desirable option for users. The theory is that it is the user, by formulating a unique and detailed prompt, who makes the creative contribution necessary for copyright to arise. However, there is a huge nuance here: how creative must this prompt be? If you wrote “draw a red car,” your creative contribution is minimal. But if you wrote a 500-word prompt with a detailed description of style, lighting, angle, environment, and mood — your creative contribution is significantly greater. Courts and regulators are only beginning to form practice regarding what level of human intervention is sufficient for copyright to arise.
3. The owner is no one (the work is in the public domain): this is the most common legal doctrine today, especially in the USA. Its logic is: if only a human can be an author, and the human’s (user’s) creative contribution to the generation is insufficient, then such a work simply has no author from the moment of creation. And if there is no author, there is no copyright. This means that generated content immediately falls into the Public Domain, and anyone can use it freely. This creates a huge risk for businesses relying on exclusivity and protection of their content.

1.3. What do OpenAI’s own rules say about rights?

The law is one thing, but there is also the agreement you automatically accept when you start using the service. And for practical daily use, it is often even more important. Let’s look closely at what is written in the Terms of Use of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and DALL-E, as this document regulates your relationship with the platform.

• Rights are formally transferred to you: OpenAI explicitly states in its rules that the company assigns to you all its rights, title, and interest in the output generated by your prompt. That is, according to this contract, you are the owner. OpenAI, in essence, says: “Everything we could have had in this content, we give to you.”
• “But there is a big nuance…”: this transfer of rights is accompanied by a key phrase: “to the extent permitted by applicable law.” And here we return to points 1.1 and 1.2. If the law of your country does not recognize the possibility of copyright protection for AI-generated content in principle, then OpenAI is essentially transferring an “empty” set of rights to you. They are transferring what, by law, may not belong to anyone anyway.
• OpenAI’s right to use: at the same time, by signing the agreement, you grant OpenAI and its affiliates the right to use your prompts and results for the further development and improvement of their services. It is very important to remember this if you plan to work with confidential information, trade secrets, or personal data. You should not “feed” the neural network anything that should not become public.

The service rules give you a “green light” to use the content. But they do not provide any guarantee that this content will be legally protected as your exclusive intellectual property.

Section 2. Rules for Legal Use of AI Content

So, we have established that the legal status of content created by artificial intelligence is ambiguous. On one hand, the rules of the platforms themselves (like OpenAI) allow us to use the results freely. On the other hand, the law does not guarantee us exclusive rights to this content. How should a business operate in such conditions? The main rule is to act cautiously, understanding the potential risks and minimizing them through proper approaches to content creation and processing.

2.1. Can you use ChatGPT content for business?

The short answer is: yes, you can. OpenAI’s Terms of Use explicitly allow commercial use of ChatGPT and content generated by their other tools, such as DALL-E. This means you have the right to:

• Publish generated texts on your commercial blog, website, or social media.
• Use texts to create advertising materials, product descriptions, and email newsletters.
• Sell products (e.g., e-books or courses) created with the help of ChatGPT.
• Use generated images for website design, creating illustrations for articles or posts.

OpenAI gives you a blank check to use the results. The problem is not the permission to use, but the protection of this content. Since generated text is unlikely to be recognized as an object of your copyright, any of your competitors can take it from your site and publish it on theirs. And you won’t be able to do anything about it, because you are not the author of this text from the legal point of view. Therefore, relying solely on AI to create key, unique content that is your competitive advantage is very risky.

2.2. The Importance of Human Intervention and Editing

How can you get out of this legal trap and still obtain rights to content created with AI? The only reliable path today is substantial human refinement. If you don’t just use the generated text “as is” but apply your own creative labor to it, you can obtain copyright for the final, derivative work.

What “substantial refinement” means:

• Deep editing and rewriting: you don’t just fix commas, but completely rewrite sentences, change the structure of the text, add your own thoughts, analytics, examples, and conclusions.
• Combining and compiling: you generate several fragments of text based on different prompts, and then creatively combine them into a unique, logically structured article, adding your own transitions and authorial style.
• Supplementing with unique data: you use the generated text as a “skeleton” but fill it with your own expertise, statistics, and research results that are not publicly available.

The key idea: the more of your own unique creative labor is in the final product, the higher the chances that a court will recognize you as the author of this work. Treat AI as your junior assistant: it can gather information and write a draft, but you create the final, high-quality, and legally protected product. This approach allows you to claim full copyright for AI content.

2.3. What about rights to images from Midjourney?

The situation with images generated by neural networks like Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion is even more complex and controversial. The rules are similar, but visual content has its own peculiarities.

• Midjourney’s position: like OpenAI, Midjourney in its rules grants users (especially those with a paid subscription) broad rights to use generated images, including for commercial purposes.
• The “creative contribution” problem: the question of whether writing a prompt is a sufficient creative contribution is even more acute here. The US Copyright Office has already set a precedent by refusing full registration of rights to a comic book whose illustrations were created by Midjourney. The Office ruled that copyright extends to the text and unique page layout (where there is the author’s creative labor), but not to the images themselves, as the author did not control exactly how Midjourney would create them.
• The “style imitation” risk: neural networks are trained on millions of copyrighted images. There is a risk that the generated image will be too similar to the works of a specific artist whose style you specified in the prompt. This could lead to claims from that artist.

By using rights to Midjourney images, you act at your own risk. For creating unique visual assets (logos, brand illustrations), the most reliable path remains collaborating with a human designer, with whom you can sign an agreement on the transfer of all property rights.

Section 3. Potential Risks and How to Avoid Them

Using artificial intelligence to create content is not only about huge opportunities but also about new, not yet fully studied legal risks. Even if you follow all the rules of legal use we discussed above, two fundamental problems remain that are worth keeping in mind. Understanding these risks will allow you to make more informed decisions about where and how to apply AI content.

3.1. Risk of infringing on others’ rights through training data

This is perhaps the biggest and most unpredictable risk. Artificial intelligence does not create anything “out of thin air.” It learns from giant datasets containing billions of texts and images collected from all over the internet. And a significant portion of this data is protected by copyright.

What is the problem?

• Lack of transparency in datasets: AI developer companies usually do not disclose exactly what data they used to train their models. Therefore, you can never be 100% sure that the generated text or image is not, in essence, a compilation or reworking of someone else’s protected works.
• Lawsuits: high-profile lawsuits are already underway around the world. Artists are suing Midjourney and Stability AI, claiming that neural networks illegally used their works for training. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, arguing that ChatGPT produces almost verbatim fragments of their unique articles.
• Risk for you: if a court finds that the training process was illegal, it could call into question the legality of all results generated by these models. There is a theoretical risk that the owner of the rights to a work that was in the training sample could make a claim against you as the end user if the generated content is too similar to their original work.

How to avoid the risk? Unfortunately, it is impossible to avoid it completely. But it can be minimized, again, through deep editing and reworking. The more the final result you publish differs from the “raw” generated text, the fewer chances there are for an accidental match.

3.2. Risk of lacking exclusive rights to the result

We have already partially touched upon this risk, but it is so important for business that it is worth considering separately. The lack of exclusive rights means you cannot prevent others from using the same or very similar content.

Why is this a problem for business?

• Competitors can copy: imagine you generated a successful advertising slogan or text for your website’s homepage. Your competitor can simply copy it, and you won’t be able to do anything about it because you don’t have copyright for this text.
• The “twin effect”: two different people using similar prompts can get very similar or even identical results from a neural network. This means the uniqueness of your content is always under threat.
• Nothing to protect: if your business model is built on unique content (e.g., you sell online courses), and all this content is generated by AI, you essentially have no valuable asset that can be protected from copying.

How to avoid the risk?

• Do not use AI to create key assets. your logo, brand name, unique selling proposition, main sales texts — all of this should be created by a human with whom you sign an agreement on the transfer of all property rights.
• Use AI for “one-off” tasks. artificial intelligence is a great tool for writing drafts, creating illustrations for regular social media posts, generating ideas — that is, for content where exclusivity is not critically important for your business.

Conclusions

The world of intellectual property is trying to catch up with technological progress but is currently lagging behind. Therefore, using AI content is always a balancing act between huge opportunities and certain legal risks, which is only part of the broader topic of intellectual property in IT.

• Main conclusion: AI is a tool, not an author. From the legal point of view, artificial intelligence cannot be an owner of rights. This means that the content it creates is likely not protected by copyright and is not your exclusive property. However, if your tool is a unique algorithm, you should consider other ways of protection, which we write about in the article on software patenting: “Patenting Software and Business Methods: Is It Possible in Ukraine?“.
• Tips for safe use of AI content:
  1. Do not use AI for key assets.
  2. Always deeply edit generated content.
  3. Avoid generating in the style of specific artists.
  4. Be careful with confidential information.

If you plan to actively integrate artificial intelligence into your business processes, the best solution would be a legal consultation on artificial intelligence issues, which will help develop an internal policy for using AI tools for your company.