AI copyright

In general, what an AI generates without a noticeable human creative contribution isn't usually protected by copyright, because most laws, Spain's included, protect works created by people. In short: if you wrote one sentence and the machine did everything else, it's hard for you to claim that result as your own work. Whether you can use it is another matter, and often you can.

Two different questions get mixed up here and it's worth separating them. One is whether what's generated is yours. The other is whether what's generated looks too much like something that already belongs to someone else: a well-known character, a brand, a photographer's picture or an artist's recognisable style. On top of that, each tool has its own terms of use, which say what you can do with what it produces, including commercially. And the more you put in (choosing, combining, retouching, rewriting), the more of your own contribution there is. It's ground that's still being settled in courts and legislation; what I describe applies to Spain and the EU and was reviewed in September 2026, so the prudent thing is not to take anything as final.

I'm not a lawyer, and when I've asked myself these questions I've looked at them in practical terms: what I can use in a business without getting into trouble. If there's money or an important brand at stake, the sensible thing is to consult a professional. I cover it in "Is what I'm doing with artificial intelligence legal?", where I go through who owns a generated text or image, and in "My business's images, made with artificial intelligence", where I have to apply it to a logo and product photos.