How Creative Is AI?

Copyright, creativity, and AI

Jon Ippolito

Professor of New Media
Director, Digital Curation graduate program
The University of Maine
LearnWithAI.org

🐦/🧵 @jonippolito 🐘 @jonippolito@digipres.club 🦋 @jonippolito.bsky.social 🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonippolito

Can AI-generated work be copyrighted?

Conclusion from the 2025 US Copyright Office report, part 2:

Us Copyright Ai Part 2 Separability

Does AI violate copyright?

Ai Harvest Data Violate Copyright Quote

The law isn't settled

👍 In two cases in 2025, Northern District of California judges found Meta and Anthropic innocent of copyright violation because AI training is transformative and therefore fair use.
👎 Both judges warned that fair use must be proven each time.
❓ Numerous other lawsuits still pending.

Requirements of the fair use defense

Factor

In AI's favor

Against AI

Is it transformative?

Factual or creative?

Amount used

Market impact

Caveats from the 2025 US Copyright Office report, part 3:

To qualify for fair use, AI must be proved transformative in each case.
Training on pirated or paywalled data is probably not fair use.
Even before generating an output, model weights can violate copyright.
AI doesn't need to produce exact copies to dilute the market.

⚠️ Copyright Registrar Shira Permutter was abruptly fired after submitting this report.

Ai Law News Us Copyright Training

How fair use applies to AI

Factor

In AI's favor

Against AI

Is it transformative?

👍 Usually

Factual or creative?

👎 Often creative

Amount used

👎 Entire Internet!

Market impact

👎 Dilutes market

Varying norms of sharing by medium

Norms for copying art styles

ai_artist_greg_rutkowsky

disney_nbc_sue_midjourney_copyright

Adding an artist's name to a prompt

ai_better_prompt_with_artists_name_sd

Norms for copying writing styles

creativity_index_ai_v_human

Norms for copying coding styles

"The use of more creative or expressive works (such as novels, movies, art, or music) is less likely to be fair use than use of factual or functional works (such as computer code)." — US Copyright Office, 2025.