Who Owns The Input? Prompt Engineering And The Expanding Edge Of Copyright Law
- IJLLR Journal
- Sep 3
- 1 min read
Parvati Arun, Institute of Law, Nirma University
I. INTRODUCTION
In March 2023, the US Copyright Office held that while AI-generated works are not generally eligible for copyright protection, a copyright application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship.” Despite this ruling , the criteria for what constitutes a “creative work” hinges on an ambiguous territory necessitating the need for further scholarship regarding the complex intertwining of human creativity with AI authorship.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) systems has fundamentally altered the creative landscape as users are able to interact with advanced AI-inputs by crafting effective prompts resulting in structured high-quality outputs. AI systems such as GPT-4, DALL-E and Midjourney are trained to generate new texts, images or audio outputs employing their data models through well structured prompts. However, these prompts which are often overlooked in legal scholarship and policy debates, are sophisticated, formalized expressions that require human creativity, skill and iteration to produce accurate, stylised or user-targeted outputs. This emerging practice which is popularly known as prompt engineering occupies a liminal space between authorship and instruction, creativity and function, user and system.
This paper aims to focus on under explored questions regarding the legal status of the prompt such as can the prompt-as the textual seed of a creative work be recognised as a protectable expression of authorship under copyright law? Should the prompt engineer be regarded as a contributing author or simply a user directing an automated tool?
