Public Opinions About Copyright for AI-Generated Art

Faculty Associate Elissa Redmiles and coauthors conducted an empirical study evaluating non-experts' intuitions about AI-generated art and copyright law. The authors found that most participants believed that creativity and effort, and not skill, are required to generate AI art, suggesting that such art might meet the creativity thresholds required for protection under copyright. Moreover, they found that participants were concerned about crediting data contributors, and that they granted that such contributors might have a legal claim to AI-generated art. However, the authors' "findings that some of these factors are susceptible to egocentric biases—while others are not—raise the question of whether current methods of determining copyright eligibility are appropriate for GenAI."

Read more from the ACM's Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference.