Copyright for Crafters — Post 7 of 8  |  pennysdream.com

7. AI and Copyright — What Crafters Need to Know

By Penny  |  April 23, 2026  |  8 min read

 

AI Has Entered the Craft Room

It happened fast, didn't it? One day you're happily cutting cardstock and arranging washi tape, and the next day there's an AI button in every app you own. Image generators, text tools, "smart" background removers — it's everywhere. Maybe you've already used an AI tool to brainstorm a color palette, write a product description, or generate a pattern. Maybe you haven't touched any of it and have some strong opinions about the whole thing. Either way, this is a topic every crafter who sells their work needs to understand.

Not because AI is scary. It's not. But the copyright rules around it are genuinely still being written, and what you don't know here can trip you up in ways that the other posts in this series haven't covered. This is new territory for everyone — lawmakers, artists, the Copyright Office, and yes, crafters who just want to make beautiful things and sell them at the Saturday market.

I want to be upfront: this is probably the most "right now" post in the entire series. Things are moving fast. What I'm writing today reflects where we are in early 2026, but some of these details could shift. I'll do my best to point out where the ground is still moving.

Can You Copyright AI-Generated Work?

This is the big question, so let's get right to it. The short answer, right now: purely AI-generated work cannot be copyrighted.

The U.S. Copyright Office has been very clear on this point. Copyright requires human authorship. If an AI system is the one making the expressive decisions — choosing colors, composing a layout, drawing the lines — that output doesn't qualify for copyright protection. It doesn't matter how clever your prompt was. If you type a description into an AI image generator and it produces a picture, you don't own the copyright to that picture. Nobody does.

This isn't just the Copyright Office's opinion anymore. In March 2025, a federal appeals court affirmed this principle in a case called Thaler v. Perlmutter. The court said flatly that an AI system cannot be listed as an author for copyright purposes. That ruling carries real weight.

So if you're generating complete designs with AI and selling them — stickers, prints, digital downloads — those designs have no copyright protection. Anyone could use them, and you'd have no legal claim to stop them.

But What If You Use AI as a Tool?

Here's where it gets more nuanced — and honestly, more relevant to how most crafters actually work.

The Copyright Office has said that using AI as a tool doesn't automatically disqualify your work from copyright. If you use AI to generate a starting element — say, a background texture or a rough sketch — and then you significantly modify it, arrange it, layer other elements on top, and build something new with your own creativity, the human-authored parts of the result can be copyrightable.

Think of it like this: if you use AI the way you'd use a fancy stamp or a pattern generator — as one ingredient in a larger creative process that you control — your overall work can still be yours. The key is that you are the one making the creative decisions. The AI is handing you raw material. You're the one turning it into something.

The more human creativity you add, the stronger your copyright claim becomes. That's a spectrum, not a bright line — and it matters.

What Counts as "Enough" Human Input?

This is the part where everyone wishes there was a simple checklist. There isn't one — the Copyright Office evaluates these things case by case — but they've given us some useful guidance.

Just writing a detailed prompt — even a really creative, thoughtful one — probably isn't enough by itself. The Office has been pretty clear that typing instructions into a generator doesn't make you the author of whatever comes out. The AI is still the one making the expressive choices.

But selecting, arranging, and editing AI outputs with significant human judgment? That can be enough.

 

Where does your work likely fall? Likely copyrightable: You use AI to generate several background textures, then select one, heavily modify its colors and composition, combine it with your hand-drawn lettering and original layout to create a greeting card design. The overall card is your creative work. Likely not copyrightable: You type a prompt into an AI image generator, download the result, and sell it as a sticker with no modification. The design was made by the AI, not by you.

 

The bottom line is that the creative decisions need to be yours. The AI can participate in the process, but it can't be the one driving.

The Training Data Question

So far we've been talking about crafters using AI. But there's another side to this coin, and it's the one that makes a lot of artists' blood boil.

AI image generators didn't learn to make pictures from nothing. They were trained on millions — sometimes billions — of images scraped from the internet. And a lot of those images were created by artists, illustrators, photographers, and yes, crafters who never gave permission for their work to be used that way.

This is a massive, ongoing legal battle. Multiple lawsuits are working through the courts right now. The Copyright Office released a major report in May 2025 specifically addressing the question of AI training on copyrighted works, and the legal framework is still being built.

Nothing has been fully resolved yet. But here's what matters for you: if your original work is online — on your Etsy shop, your Instagram, your website — it may have been used to train AI models. You didn't agree to it. You probably didn't even know about it. And right now, the law hasn't caught up to tell us definitively whether that was okay or not.

I don't say this to make you angry (though it's understandable if you are). I say it because it's important to know that this question exists and that real people — including legislators — are actively working on answers.

Transparency and Disclosure

Regardless of where the law ultimately lands on all of this, there's one principle that's becoming the clear standard: be transparent.

If you use AI in your creative process, being upfront about it is both the ethical thing to do and the practical thing to do. Many online marketplaces are starting to require AI disclosure in listings. Buyers increasingly want to know how something was made — and handmade buyers especially care about this.

Being honest about your process doesn't diminish your work. If you used an AI tool to generate a background texture and then spent two hours hand-lettering, cutting, layering, and assembling a card, that's still your creative work. Saying so shows integrity, not weakness.

A simple note goes a long way. Something like: "Original artwork created with AI-assisted design tools and refined by the artist" tells buyers what they need to know without making a big production of it.

The Crafter's Practical Takeaway

Okay, let's bring this home. Here's what all of this means if you're a crafter making and selling things:

If you're creating entirely by hand with traditional tools — nothing changes for you. Your work is copyrighted the moment you make it, just like we talked about back in Post 1 of this series. Carry on.

If you're using AI as one tool in a larger creative process — your human-authored contributions are protectable. The more of yourself you put into the final piece, the stronger your copyright claim. Use AI like you'd use any other supply: as a starting point, not the finish line.

If you're generating complete designs with AI and selling them as-is — you have no copyright protection on those designs. That means anyone could legally copy and use them, and you'd have no recourse. That's a real business risk worth thinking about.

If you're worried about your own work being used to train AI — you're not alone, and the legal system is actively working on this question. It's worth following, and I'll share updates if things change significantly.

And above all: stay informed. This area of law is evolving faster than any other topic in this series. What's true today might look different a year from now.

The Bottom Line

AI isn't going away, and it's not the enemy. It's a tool — like a die cut machine or a stamp press — and the copyright rules around it are catching up to the technology. Some of those rules are clearer than others. Some are still being argued about in courtrooms and government offices right now.

The clearest path for crafters today is simple: use AI thoughtfully, add genuine human creativity, be transparent about your process, and keep an eye on how the rules develop.

The next and final post in this series brings everything together with a practical checklist you can actually use — a quick-reference guide for all the copyright basics we've covered. I'm looking forward to wrapping this up with something you can pin to your craft room wall.

 

Disclaimer: I'm a crafter, not a lawyer. Everything in this post comes from my own research and curiosity — not legal advice. If real money or a real dispute is on the line, talk to an actual attorney.

 

Where I Looked This Up

●     U.S. Copyright Office — Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: copyright.gov/ai

●     U.S. Copyright Office — Part 2: Copyrightability Report (January 2025)

●     Thaler v. Perlmutter — D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals (March 2025)

●     U.S. Copyright Office — Part 3: Generative AI Training (May 2025)

●     This post was written with the help of AI-assisted research and drafting, and reviewed by an actual human crafter (that's me).

Copyright for Crafters — Post 7 of 8

→ Next up: The Copyright Checklist Every Crafter Needs