If AI Creates the Image, Who Owns It?

Imagine this.

You open an AI image generator, type a detailed prompt and, seconds later, you have a beautiful image.

You didn't draw it.

You didn't take the photograph.

You didn't manually create the artwork.

So, who owns it?

You? The AI company? Or nobody?

This is where artificial intelligence creates a fascinating problem for intellectual property law.

Generative AI allows people to create images, music, videos and written works with minimal traditional creative effort. But copyright law has historically been built around the idea of human authorship and human creativity.

Under Nigeria's Copyright Act 2022, copyright protection is given to eligible works created by an author. This raises an important question in the context of generative AI:

Can an AI system itself be considered the author of a work?

And if it cannot, does the person who provided the prompt automatically become the copyright owner?

Not necessarily.

Writing a prompt does not automatically mean that a person owns every output generated from it. The legal position can depend on factors including the nature of the human contribution, the creative choices involved and whether the resulting work satisfies the requirements for copyright protection.

There is another side to the problem.

What happens when an AI-generated image resembles an existing artist's work?

Or when copyrighted material is used in developing an AI system?

Or when someone generates an image and another person reproduces and commercially exploits it?

These questions show that AI is not simply an issue of technology. It is also an intellectual property problem.

For Nigeria, this creates an important conversation about whether existing copyright principles are sufficient for an era where machines can generate sophisticated creative works in seconds.

Perhaps the question is no longer simply:

“Who created this?”

It is becoming:

“What does it mean to be a creator when humans and machines create together?”

And that is a question intellectual property law can no longer afford to ignore.