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It is not copyrightable. This is already settled law.
It’s a little more complicated than how you’re making it out to be and it’s also going to depend on where you live.
TL/DR: It can be copyrightable as a whole, but the output of a single prompt is not likely copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office put together a report in 2025 on how AI is being handled in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
See Section II - F: “Modifying or Arranging AI-Generated Content”
Then if you skip to the conclusion of the report:
If you’re curious where your country falls on the spectrum, see Section III - International Approaches.
Edit: added TL/DR.
Trust Me vs. Bro (2026)
Only works created by humans can be copyrighted. This was borne out when it was determined that a photo a … monkey? Ape? One of those, took of itself by accident could not have copyright because a person wasn’t involved in the creation of the image.
So far, the same has been ruled for works created by GenAI. See all the artworks out there that people were mad about not being able to get copyrighted.
edit: Also see this article. https://www.wordsbywes.ink/articles/tools/llm-generated-text-still-cant-be-copyrighted/
Further down:
It’s like you googled it and copy pasted the link without reading it.
You can copyright something the moment you modify it or use it in something else. The law is more about how AI can’t hold onto copyrights. It’s to protect us from OpenAI saying they own everything you generate with their model. It stop copyright mills from running gens 24/7 and copyrighting every possible way to write a simple function.
It is a bit more complicated than that, and the legal motivation from the Copyright Office is different than what you describe.
One of the most informative cases, in my opinion, is the Copyright Office’s back and forth on Zarya of the Dawn. In their view, even thousands of refining prompts cannot be sufficient to convey copyright protection on an AI generated image since it lacks the necessary control and connection to the person. Suryast is another helpful case. I think they’re still very incomplete when you start to consider works like those from Jackson Pollock or, my personal favorite hypo, an artist with a prosthetic that uses statistical machine learning to control the end effector and thus the paintbrush. But those are just hypotheticals for now.
I help chair a conference of IP attorneys and others who specialize in software licensing and AI so we’ve been talking about this for a while now. We actually just had the conference this week so I can probably share some resources or presentations if people really want to get nerdy about it.
I’d actually love some documentation because it is indeed very complicated.
I’m also curious about your opinion on which way they will swing, since I see the courts kind of sticking to the middle more than anything.
The Zarya case seems pretty clear. From an article though:
By and large, Sota models do give that kind of control nowadays, so I don’t know if that would change things.
I feel like it’s going to end up as a case by case basis, where it depends on the feeling of effort put into it more than anything else.
I suppose the general understanding thus far is similar to how much copyright a boss is entitled to the intellectual work of his underlings? I mean, that hypothetical artist is actually controlling the tool, vibe coders aren’t controlling anything.
If it’s vibe coded, the person who wrote the prompt had minimal impact on the output. They can’t, because they don’t understand how it works. Their contribution is primarily limited to 1. writing a spec, which is often laughably vague, 2. testing the output to see if it works, and 3. if it doesn’t work right, telling the AI to fix the problems.
This was also in response to the ‘trust me bro’ snide comment. I’m not going to go into detail for something that is practically sealioning.
What you say applies to slop, not anyone using AI seriously. Which is a small minority, but still.
If you put in a lot of work, you might not be the author of the realization but you are author of the concept (assuming it is not trivial). Why should you not be able to protect your ideas?
What is the status of a movie director compared to the actors?
Who is usually mentioned when discussing whether the movie was well crafted or not?
The best actor cannot save a shitty plot.
You’re thinking of patents, not copyright. You can’t copyright an idea, only the implementation of an idea. I could spend years perfecting a play, but when a troupe performs that play, I don’t own their performance.
And you underestimate the idiocy of self-proclaimed ‘vibe coders’. Go into practically any FOSS community and see what they have to say about vibe-coded pull requests. The people making them have no clue what the code is doing, they’re just chasing clout with minimal effort.
That’s really going to depend on how strictly you define “vibe coded”. If that means that someone put in a single prompt and the LLM spit out an entire program, then yes, I doubt that would be copyrightable.
However, if the person “vibe coding” does understand how to program, and they use multiple prompts and organize the code to make a working product, then the code could be copyrightable by compilation:
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
That’s a real big ‘if’. Someone who understands and shapes the code isn’t really vibe coding. I might still not agree with what they’re doing, but it’s not vibe coding if they can take responsibility for every line of code produced.
This article is from the Free Software Foundation Europe. It does mention US law and how they and other countries require a natural person to create the work, but also that e.g. Ireland and the UK do not.
It also doesn’t really define ‘vibe code’ the way that it is generally understood by developers. Lots of devs use LLMs to do the busywork parts of development without actually vibe coding. It’s when you don’t understand what your code does that it becomes ‘vibe code’ - i.e. you’re relying on the vibes rather than understanding the code itself to determine if it’s good enough. Under that definition, where the prompt typically isn’t detailed enough to be considered a significant creative work and the person doing the prompting not only does not - but cannot - understand what it is doing, vibe code is NOT copyrightable, full stop.
If it gets included in a larger work that doesn’t fit that definition, then sure, the whole is copyrightable, but then it’s just chunks of vibe code, not a vibe coded product - and the contribution in the form of a pull request is not. It is public domain.
deleted by creator
RTFA