If You Prompt a Movie or Song Into Existence With AI, You Shouldn’t Be Able to Profit From It; The Hollywood Reporter, August 31, 2026

David Barber, The Hollywood Reporter; If You Prompt a Movie or Song Into Existence With AI, You Shouldn’t Be Able to Profit From It

"Preserving the value of human creativity is not as difficult as it would seem. I propose that the following two provisions be the framework of legislation for the protection of artists:

1. Legislation prohibiting prompt-driven outputs or assets of Generative AI models, and whole works that contain prompt-driven outputs or assets of Generative AI models as any part of said whole, from being copyrighted.

2. Legislation stating that all prompt-driven Generative AI outputs, assets, and their derivatives be clearly labeled as such: Visibly – pictures, images, and videos; Audibly – songs, scores, sound effects/design;  Metadata – trackable for ALL generative AI outputs.

The goal of a law, or laws, built upon these foundational principles, is to disallow the:

• prompting of a song into existence and profiting from it
• prompting of a film or video into existence and profiting from it
• killing of creative departments and using prompt-driven outputs to replace their artistry
• existence of unidentifiable deepfakes

Under such regulations, individual prompted outputs would be ineligible for copyright protection, as would whole works that contain them. Examples include films that use a prompt-generated score, sound effects, visual effects, or VoiceOver, and songs that use prompt-generated horn sections, backup vocals, or other core elements that contribute to the song’s final presentation. Beyond the ethical and moral reasons for these provisions, there is also a legal basis for them.

The language must also prevent corporations from hiding any prompt-driven Generative AI usage under Trade Secret Law."

Copyright win: Sorry, ChatGPT won't help you write like Hemingway anymore; Euro.news, July 30, 2026

 Una Hajdari, Euro.news; Copyright win: Sorry, ChatGPT won't help you write like Hemingway anymore

"OpenAI has quietly reprogrammed the chatbot to reject direct requests to replicate or mimic a named author's voice, whether they are still alive to object or have been dead for decades."

Lilian Doan Davis, Polsinelli PC,  The National Law Review; Who Owns AI-Generated Content? Human Authorship Still Controls, and Documenting the Creation Process Is Critical

"Practical Steps Companies Should Consider Now

Businesses using generative AI should consider a few immediate steps:

• Document human creative input. Preserve drafts, edits, source files and records showing who selected, arranged, revised or transformed AI outputs.
• Do not assume prompting establishes ownership. Prompt logs may help show process, but they are not a substitute for evidence of human-authored expression.
• Be precise in registration strategy. Applicants should disclose AI-generated material where required, identify the human author’s contribution and claim only the human-authored portions.
• Revisit contracts and internal policies. Vendor agreements, employee policies and content-development protocols should not assume that all AI-assisted output is fully protectable or exclusively owned in the same way as traditionally authored material.

Bottom Line

The law remains grounded in conventional copyright principles. The Copyright Office’s recent guidance and the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Thaler point in the same direction: copyright protection still turns on human authorship, even when AI is part of the process.

For businesses, the practical implication is not simply that some AI-generated works may be unprotectable. It is that ownership, registration and enforcement may depend on whether the company can later show what a human author actually contributed. In that sense, AI governance is also evidence governance."

Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst; CNBC, March 6, 2024

Hayden Field, CNBC; Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst

"The company, founded by ex-Meta researchers, specializes in evaluation and testing for large language models — the technology behind generative AI products.

Alongside the release of its new tool, CopyrightCatcher, Patronus AI released results of an adversarial test meant to showcase how often four leading AI models respond to user queries using copyrighted text.

The four models it tested were OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral.

“We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, who previously worked on responsible AI research at Meta, told CNBC in an interview.

Qian added, “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is arguably the most powerful model that’s being used by a lot of companies and also individual developers, produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”"