Gavel & Glass Briefing - Generative AI and Association Content: Who Owns the Copyright?
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney can help associations produce curriculum, marketing copy, certification materials, and other content efficiently. But where AI contributes to content central to an association’s mission or revenue, the association should understand an important limitation: copyright protection may be unavailable or limited for AI-generated material that lacks sufficient human authorship.
Human Authorship Still Matters
Current U.S. copyright law requires human authorship. In 2025, the D.C. Circuit upheld the Copyright Office’s refusal to register a work described as autonomously generated by an AI system and naming the system as its sole author. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).
The Copyright Office takes a similar position: copyright may protect a person’s original contributions to an AI-assisted work, but not AI-generated material without sufficient human authorship. The assessment is fact-specific. Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (U.S. Copyright Office, Jan. 2025).
A detailed prompt may be useful, but the Copyright Office’s current view is that prompting alone generally does not establish authorship of the resulting expressive output. The association therefore should not assume that it has enforceable copyright in every output merely because an employee wrote the prompt or used the tool during work.
The Practical Risk
If a training module, white paper, exam question, or other proprietary asset is substantially AI-generated without sufficient original human contribution, the association may have limited—or no—copyright protection in those portions. That can make it harder to stop competitors from copying the material under copyright law.
This does not necessarily mean the entire work is automatically in the public domain. A work may still contain protectable human-authored text, revisions, or creative selection and arrangement. It may also involve contract, trademark, confidentiality, or other rights.
Practical Steps for AI-Assisted Content
Use AI as an assistive tool. For high-value content, human contributors should add original expression through drafting, creative rewriting, substantive development, or other meaningful authorship. There is no fixed percentage of edits; the inquiry is case-specific.
Preserve creative choices. A human may claim copyright in original selection, coordination, arrangement, or modification of AI-generated and human-authored material. In the Copyright Office’s 2023 Zarya of the Dawn registration decision, the Office protected the author’s text and creative arrangement, while excluding Midjourney-generated images. Zarya of the Dawn Registration Decision (U.S. Copyright Office, Feb. 2023).
Keep records. Retain drafts, revision histories, and editorial notes showing the human creative work that shaped the final product.
Address registration carefully. Applicants seeking U.S. copyright registration must disclose AI-generated material that is more than de minimis and identify the human-authored material claimed. The Copyright Office has not adopted a fixed numerical threshold. Copyright Registration Guidance (U.S. Copyright Office, Mar. 2023).
Generative AI can be a valuable tool for brainstorming, outlining, and content development. For proprietary content an association expects to protect through copyright, it should be able to identify and document sufficient original human authorship in the final work.
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