AI image and text tools make it tempting to fill a product with generated material: covers, illustrations, printable art, even whole ebooks. Before you build a business on that, it helps to understand one uncomfortable point. In the United States, the parts of your product that an AI system generated on its own may not be protected by copyright at all.
That doesn’t automatically mean you can’t sell them. It means you may not be able to stop someone else from copying them. Here’s what the U.S. Copyright Office has said, in plain terms. This is general information, not legal advice; rules differ by country and are still developing.
What the Copyright Office Said in 2025
On January 29, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released Part 2 of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, focused on whether AI outputs can be copyrighted. The main conclusions:
- Human authorship is still required. Copyright protects original expression created by a human. Material whose expressive elements were determined by a machine isn’t protected.
- Prompts alone aren’t enough. The Office concluded that typing prompts, even detailed ones, does not by itself give you enough control over the output to make you its author.
- Using AI as a tool is fine. Using AI to assist your own creative work doesn’t disqualify the work. Your human-made parts can still be protected.
- Your own inputs can count. If you feed in your own copyrightable work (say, your drawing) and it is still recognizable in the output, your portion can be protected.
- Selection, arrangement and edits can count. Creatively arranging or meaningfully modifying AI output can be protected, judged case by case.
The Office didn’t draw bright lines. Whether your contribution is enough depends on the facts of each work. It also didn’t recommend new laws to give AI outputs extra protection, so don’t expect this to change quickly.
It’s worth separating two questions that often get mixed up. Copyright protection is about whether you can stop others from copying something. Whether you’re allowed to sell a product is a different question, shaped by the AI tool’s terms, the platform’s rules and whether the output copies someone else’s protected work. The report only addressed the first question.
A Real Example: A Comic Book Registration
The Office’s approach shows up in an earlier decision about a graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn. The author wrote the text and used an AI image generator for the pictures, refining prompts over many attempts. The Office cancelled the original registration and issued a new one covering only the human-written text and the selection and arrangement of the images, not the AI-generated images themselves.
For a one-person business, that’s the practical lesson: your words, your layout and your creative choices are yours. The raw generated images may not be.
What This Means for Digital Products
Copying Risk
If a product is mostly raw AI output, you may have little ground to object when someone copies it. Products built mainly around your own writing, structure, examples and edits are on firmer footing and are usually more useful to buyers anyway.
Registration Disclosure
If you ever register a work that contains more than a minimal amount of AI-generated material, the Copyright Office’s 2023 registration guidance asks you to disclose it and claim only the human-authored parts. The guidance warns that leaving it out can cause problems for the registration later.
Platform Rules Are a Separate Question
Copyright is only one layer. Marketplaces and publishing platforms have their own AI policies, and your AI tool has its own terms of use. Read both before you sell. If you publish on platforms like Amazon KDP or YouTube, check their disclosure rules too.
A Practical Way to Use AI Images and Text
- Use AI for drafts, ideas and rough visuals, then put real human work on top: rewrite, edit, combine, redraw or rearrange.
- Keep simple notes of what you created yourself and what the tool produced. If a question ever comes up, you’ll be glad you did.
- Read the terms of the AI tool you use for anything about commercial use and ownership of outputs.
- Don’t prompt for a living artist’s style, a known character or a brand. That invites a different set of problems.
- When the stakes are high, such as a flagship course or a book you plan to license, talk to an intellectual property attorney.
None of this means AI-assisted products are off-limits. It means the durable value in your product should come from you: your judgment, your structure, your explanations. That’s also what buyers are paying for.
Do This Today
Pick one product or freebie you’ve made with AI help and write a short note listing which parts you wrote, designed or edited yourself and which came straight from a tool. Save it with the product files.
More on Totally Relentless
- When to Disclose AI Use: KDP, YouTube and FTC Rules in Plain Words
- How to Fact-Check AI Output Before You Hit Publish
- What to Keep Out of AI Chats: Protecting Private Data in a One-Person Business
