Prompts and outputs can be protected but the risk of plagiarism remains

Protecting human creativity in the training of artificial intelligence, but also protecting human works of genius created with the support of Ai. The relationship between copyright and artificial intelligence moves on a parallel track. When Ai systems became widespread, intellectual property protection lawsuits mainly concerned works protected by copyright and given to the machine, without consent, for the training process. "In my opinion, we are moving in the direction of providing licences and finding economic agreements, as in the case of Universal Music vs. Anthropic Ai, to put in order the digital far west of the past years," explains Lucia Maggi, a lawyer at the Milan Bar. "Interesting, in this sense, will be to find out the conclusion of the lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAi and Microsoft, especially since the judge has asked, as a precautionary measure, to remove the content uploaded inviolation of the Nyt's copyright from the training: is this technically possible?"

Alongside these proceedings, another type of lawsuit has recently been coming to court that aims to protect works created with the help of Ai. "The Law 132/2025 provides important guidelines both for training activities through the principle of transparency and respect of the opt-out when it comes to exceptions (amendment to articles 1 and 70 of Law 633/1941) and for when we use Ai as a support tool in creation," Maggi clarifies. "According to copyright, works created with Ai are protectable, provided that human ingenuity is predominant over the activity performed by the machine. The regulatory criticality is linked precisely to this interpretation: it will not be easy to decide for those who will be called upon to assess, because there are no quantitative parameters'.

The case-by-case assessment is the only possible approach, at the moment, in law, because much of the creative process is mental whereas in practice prompting may be easier. "The discussion is not so much about Ai tout court but about artificial intelligences of the generative kind, that's where the machine provides the extra quid, distinguishing between Ai-generated works and AI-assisted works," Maggi adds.

Finally, with regard to the concept of plagiarism, it is important to remember how frequent it is to run into unintentional plagiarism. "The terms of service of Ai's platforms make it clear that the output is the property of the person who generated it, but they do not provide any guarantee that this does not infringe third party rights," the lawyer concludes. "The case of the images created in the style of Studio Ghibli or the Italian Plumber, made as if it were Nintendo's Super Mario, or the ketchup bottle, designed in the same way as Heinz's, clearly highlight the problem of unauthorised training: plagiarism is always just around the corner.