Creating with generative AI: proving your human contribution

Illustrations, text, music, code: generative AI tools are now part of many creative processes. They raise a new question: what, in the result, belongs to you?

Copyright protects human creation

Under French law, copyright protects original works, meaning works that bear the imprint of their author's personality. According to the prevailing view, content produced entirely by a machine, without human creative choices, does not meet this condition.

Conversely, when you use AI as a tool, your contribution can be protected: the conception of the idea, writing detailed instructions, selecting among many outputs, retouching, assembling and composing the final result. The more numerous and identifiable your choices, the more defensible your authorship.

The real issue: being able to prove it

A final result alone does not show what comes from you and what comes from the tool. In a dispute, the process is what makes the difference: intermediate stages, discarded versions, corrections, successive instructions.

Keep and date as you go: your initial sketches and references, your prompts and how they evolved, the outputs you kept and discarded, then each retouched version up to the final file.

The Creative Session Registry

The Creative Session Registry is the dated log of your creative process at Ipocamp: it links together your successive versions and work stages, from the first file to the final result. Each deposit receives a verifiable date, and generative AI contributions can be documented separately from the human contributions that accompany them. You build a consistent body of evidence, stronger than an isolated final file.

Two additional precautions

Read the AI tool's terms of use: they specify what you can do with generated content, especially for commercial use.

If you work for a client, tell them about your use of AI and address it in the contract: an assignment of rights can only cover what is actually protectable.

This article is for general information purposes and does not replace the advice of a legal professional. The law applicable to AI-assisted creations is evolving.