If You Prompt a Movie or Song Into Existence With AI, You Shouldn’t Be Able to Profit From It
Lori Silfen, president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors, argues in an opinion piece that content generated purely from AI prompts, without genuine human authorship, should not qualify for copyright protection. She contends that reducing art to a "prompt" undermines the creative process and devalues the work of professional artists, and calls on legislators to act quickly to protect the film and music industries from being reshaped by generative AI before adequate safeguards are in place.
Silfen proposes two legislative provisions: first, that prompt-driven AI outputs, and any larger works incorporating them, should be ineligible for copyright; second, that all such outputs and their derivatives be clearly labelled visibly, audibly and via trackable metadata, with corporations barred from hiding AI use behind trade secret law. She distinguishes this from AI tools used to enhance human-authored material, such as in post-production, which would remain unaffected. Citing the US Supreme Court's Feist Publications v Rural Telephone Service ruling, she argues copyright law already requires a "spark" of human creativity, meaning generative AI, as a statistical prediction tool, cannot legally be considered an author.
- Sound editors' union president urges laws denying copyright to AI-prompted content.
- Proposal: no copyright for prompt-driven works, plus mandatory AI-content labelling.
- Argues generative AI is derivative, not creative, per existing US copyright law.
New here? Start with this
Copyright gives creators legal rights over how their work is used. In the US, the law generally requires human creativity for a work to qualify, though people can use tools and still be its authors.
Generative AI can produce images, films or music in response to written instructions, drawing on patterns learned from existing material. The debate is over whether a person who supplies prompts has contributed enough creative work to claim copyright, and how audiences should be told when AI has been used.
Lori Silfen represents sound editors who work on films and other productions. Her proposal would exclude prompt-generated material from copyright and require AI-made content to be labelled, while allowing AI tools to assist with work created by people.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Copyright is meant to reward human creative choices, and a prompt alone may not show the authorship the law is designed to protect. Denying copyright to wholly AI-generated works could preserve that principle, help audiences identify synthetic material and prevent companies from claiming exclusive rights over outputs produced with little human contribution. Clear labelling could also support transparency while leaving AI tools available to assist human creators.
The case against
A blanket exclusion could be too broad where a person’s prompts, selection, editing or arrangement make a meaningful creative contribution, and could leave the boundary between assistance and generation difficult to apply. Copyright protection can encourage investment and creative experimentation, while labelling mandates and limits on trade-secret claims could impose costs or disclose commercially sensitive processes. Existing legal standards may be better suited to assess human authorship case by case than a new categorical rule.
AI Entertainment Film Government Music Politics Technology TV