On Copyright in the Age of AI

TL;DR:

The Some Amazons wallpapers are public domain images. If you want to use them elsewhere, they’re yours for the taking, even for commercial purposes, with attribution and a link back appreciated but not required.

The More Tomorrow images should be considered to be copyrighted derivative works. This includes More Tomorrow images I’ve used on the website, in social media posts, in newsletter editions, or anywhere else.

To display one of these images at no cost for a non-commercial purpose, give credit to “©2025 Greg R. Fishbone, generated by MidJourney as a derivative work of the poem, ‘Name of Poem’ by Greg R. Fishbone,” and provide a link back to the poem I used to generate the image. For commercial purposes, inquire first.

Any use of my copyrighted Works for AI Training is governed by an AI Licensing Agreement. This Agreement is a binding legal contract, so please read the full contents of the Agreement carefully and fully before engaging in any AI Training based on my Works.

The Dream…

Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been secretly developing an AI model to feed corrupting data to all other AI models, rendering them useless. At the same time, it will develop and distribute social media messaging to convince deep-pocketed investors to pull their money out of AI companies and redirect it into clean energy, environmental protection, and climate change mitigation.

Or at least, that’s my dream of an ideal AI project, if only I had the development budget.

As this technology has evolved, I’ve tried to keep both an open mind and a skeptical eye on new AI tools, which currently exist as a coin-flip between their promises to help and the capacities to harm.

Does AI Help or Harm Creative Work?

In my creative writing, I’ve so far found no benefit to using AI. The writing and revising process is too enjoyable for me to outsource any part of it to an electronic mind. I also worry that relying too much on AI would stunt the personal growth and development that comes from honing and practicing a craft.

Even if AI were capable of matching or surpassing the quality of the best human authors, allowing it to replace human authors en masse would, within a generation, atrophy all human capability and capacity for creative works, and we would have given up an important part of what it means to be human.

Aside from the actual work of writing, I’ve found AI’s potential to serve as a sounding board, research assistant, or backstory developer to be tempting, in theory, but entirely unnecessary in my practice. I’m not averse to a use that makes me more productive or frees up my time, but I haven’t yet found any obvious place for AI in my writing workflow so far. While some authors have been using AI for marketing materials, I absolutely hate the over-the-top style of AI advertising copy, so that’s a hard pass for me as well.

Does AI Help or Harm Collaboration?

Because I specialize in words and not art, one thing AI has been able to do for me is to create decorative elements to give my words more visual appeal.

Has this use of AI put a human artist out of work? Since I was never in a position to commission a human artist to decorate my website, I don’t think so.

I imagine that elsewhere in the world, a visual artist is using AI to craft little stories that bring life to their artwork. If so, has that AI usage put a human author out of work? Also probably not, if the artist had no means of commissioning a human author.

Perhaps in an alternate world, my artistic counterpart and I are combining our skills into a collaborative project unlike anything the world has ever seen. Perhaps the availability of AI has discouraged both of us from seeking out human collaborators, resulting in fewer multimedia masterworks. Perhaps there will be no webcomic or graphic novel version of Some Amazons because AI has damaged the traditional connections between authors and artists.

While an alternate world with a kick-ass Some Amazons graphic novel is the best case for an AI-free scenario, also possible is the AI-free world where my counterpart and I still don’t manage to connect and continue to work alone with fewer creative tools available. There, I’d have had to settle for a text-based site with no images, while my counterpart would have an art gallery with no narrative threads. Users would find my poetry collection dull to look at and my counterpart’s gallery lacking in narrative appeal, so both sites would ultimately fail to live up to their full potential.

In that way, at least, the availability of AI averages out the best case and worst case scenarios, making it impossible to tell whether society has earned a net gain or net loss.

Does AI Usage Impact Copyright?

My author website is composed of human-generated words with just enough AI decoration to make the pages presentable and attractive to visitors, hopefully bringing a net benefit to the world.

Now let’s talk about copyright.

I’m a lawyer. I know on copyright law, and one thing I’ve had drilled into me since law school is that copyright law always lags behind the technological curve until new laws are passed, lawsuits are decided, and gray areas resolve into consensus. This is true whether we’re talking about the historical introduction of photography, sound recordings, computers, the internet, or the modern development of AI and large language models.

One emerging consensus is that copyrightable works require a human mind. AI-art is not art, AI-writing is not writing, and AI-video is not video unless a human is contributing some original transformative effort to the work. The exact boundaries of that effort have yet to be defined, and it doesn’t help that some humans have been dishonestly claiming AI-generated works as their own, but the general rule is that only the original creative works of a human mind are copyrightable.

For example:

That was the first easy part. Here is the second:

Behind the text of the Some Amazons poems are some thematic wallpapers made by prompting a generative AI called MidJourney. I’ve personalized the standard MidJourney model with my preferences and tastes.

Without those exact personalization preferences, it’s unlikely that any other user would ever be able to recreate identical images, even with the same model, same prompt, and same starting seed.

But does reflect transformative creative effort on my part? I can’t make that argument with a straight face.

Therefore, it’s safe to assume the Some Amazons wallpapers are public domain images. If you have use for them elsewhere, they’re yours for the taking, even for commercial purposes, with attribution and a link back appreciated but not required.

Now it gets harder…

Behind the text of the More Tomorrow poems are images made by feeding entire original poems into the Sleeping Android–that is, using the entire poem’s text as the prompt in the personalized MidJourney model. Even with the same preferences, the same model, and the same seed, these images can not be recreated without using one of my original copyrighted poems.

Arguably, to legally recreate any of these images, a person would need an explicit license or assignment for its poetic prompt. Otherwise, arguably, there could be liability for a claim of copyright infringement.

I say “arguably” because a litigant would argue that side before a judge, on what is currently a gray area of copyright law, and hope to overcome the counterargument from the other side to achieve a final resolution.

Can sufficiently creative human-generated prompts be copyrightable?

Arguably yes.

Can a copyright holder seek remedy for the use of copyrighted material in prompting and AI?

Arguably yes.

When a copyright holder exercises their exclusive right to use their own copyrighted material to prompt an AI, is the resultant image itself a copyrightable derivative work?

Arguably yes!

Therefore, until copyright law on the subject is clarified, to be on the safe side, the More Tomorrow images should be considered to be copyrighted derivative works. This includes More Tomorrow images I’ve used on the website, in social media posts, in newsletter editions, or anywhere else.

To use one of these images at no cost for a non-commercial purpose, give credit to “© 2025 Greg R. Fishbone, generated by MidJourney as a derivative work of the poem, ‘Name of Poem’ by Greg R. Fishbone,” and provide a link back to the poem I used to generate the image. For commercial purposes, inquire first.

Are AI Companies Stealing from Creators?

Arguably yes!

The AI companies are using copyrighted works without permission to train LLMs and generative AI models. To do this, they are taking entire works, often representing an author’s or artist’s lifetime creative output, with the intent to profit off the creation of competing works in a firehose of content that no human creator will be able to match, causing consumer confusion in the marketplace and permanently diluting and devaluing all of the work that was taken and making future human creativity less viable.

Under current copyright law, this is (or should be) very, very, very much illegal…arguably. This argument is ongoing in the courts right now, in several cases pitting human creators against AI developers.

I’m on the side of the human creators. Trouble is, the AI developers, flush with venture capital cash and with lobbyists on retainer, have their lips to legislative ears that may be receptive to changing to laws, tilting the scales toward “legalizing” the large-scale theft of intellectual property.

Authors and artists may have little recourse to prevent the AI companies from scooping up our work and using it to replace us. But if I can’t stop the AI companies from stealing my work, I can at least ask for compensation for the devaluation of my copyright. Which is why I created an AI Licensing Agreement linked from every page on my website.

Any use of my copyrighted Works for AI Training is governed by an AI Licensing Agreement. This Agreement is a binding legal contract, so please read the full contents of the Agreement carefully and fully before engaging in any AI Training based on my Works.

I encourage all creators to use a similar agreement, place an appropriate value on your work, put the AI companies on notice, and let them choose whether to use your work or not under the terms you set.

Will this be an effective means of enforcement and/or dissuasion? It’s arguable, at the very least.