Do I own the images and videos I generate with AI?

You need to separate two questions. What the platform grants you is a contract matter, settled by its terms - here, the output is yours to use, including commercially. Whether copyright protects that output against someone else copying it is a different question, and in several jurisdictions purely machine-generated work attracts no copyright at all because there is no human author.

Can I use AI-generated content commercially?

Under these terms, yes. The practical caveat is not permission but exclusivity: if the work carries no copyright in your jurisdiction, you can use it freely and so can anyone who copies it. Where that matters, the usual answer is to combine generated material with enough human authorship that the finished piece is protectable.

Guide

Who owns what you generate

Two questions get asked as one, and they have different answers. What a platform allows you to do is settled by its terms. Whether the law will protect the result against being copied is a separate matter, and far less settled than most people assume.

Question one

What the platform permits

This part is a contract, so it is knowable: read the terms and you have your answer. Platforms vary more than you would expect — some claim a broad licence over everything generated, some reserve the right to use your output to promote themselves, some restrict commercial use to higher tiers.

Here, you keep ownership of anything you upload, and you may use output you generate commercially. The licence you grant us is the operational one needed to run the service: storing your files, sending them to model providers to fulfil a generation, and screening them for safety.

Two limits are stated plainly in the same clause and are worth reading rather than skimming. We make no warranty that output is free of third-party rights, and we do not indemnify you against claims arising from your use of it. The permission is real; the risk of what you generate remains yours.

The full text is on the terms page, under “Your content and ours”.

Question two

Whether copyright protects it at all

This is the part that surprises people, and no platform can answer it for you, because it is not ours to decide.

Copyright in most traditions protects the creative expression of a human author. Several jurisdictions have taken the position that output generated purely by a machine, with no meaningful human authorship, has no author and therefore attracts no copyright at all. Others treat the question as open, and a few are more willing to find authorship in the act of directing a tool. The picture differs by country and is actively moving.

So the uncomfortable possibility is this: you may be entirely free to use an image commercially, and simultaneously unable to stop anyone else from using the identical image. Permission and exclusivity are different things, and generated work can have the first without the second.

Note also that a prompt is generally not the protectable part. The text you wrote may itself be a small literary work, but that is a long way from owning every picture it can produce.

In practice

What this changes about how you work

Where exclusivity matters, add authorship. A generated element placed into a composition you designed, edited, sequenced and scored is part of a work with evident human authorship. The usual professional answer is not to choose between generated and made, but to treat generated material as raw footage.

Keep your own record of what you made. Retaining prompts, parameters and the editing steps you took is the evidence of your own contribution, which is exactly what any authorship argument turns on. Bear in mind that generated results here are deleted after 3 days, or longer on a paid plan, so downloading what you intend to keep is on you.

Do not assume a brand or a face is clear to use. The absence of copyright in generated output says nothing about trademarks, or about the rights a person holds in their own likeness. Those are separate claims with separate owners, and they are the ones most likely to arrive as a complaint — the guide on generating a real person covers that side.

This is a general explanation of how the question is usually framed, not legal advice, and it is not specific to your jurisdiction or your situation. If exclusivity or commercial risk is material to what you are making, take advice from someone qualified in your own country.

Asked often

Short answers

Do I own the images and videos I generate with AI?: You need to separate two questions. What the platform grants you is a contract matter, settled by its terms - here, the output is yours to use, including commercially. Whether copyright protects that output against someone else copying it is a different question, and in several jurisdictions purely machine-generated work attracts no copyright at all because there is no human author.
Can I use AI-generated content commercially?: Under these terms, yes. The practical caveat is not permission but exclusivity: if the work carries no copyright in your jurisdiction, you can use it freely and so can anyone who copies it. Where that matters, the usual answer is to combine generated material with enough human authorship that the finished piece is protectable.

Keep reading

The rest of the series

Where this comes from

Unlimited Studio is built around this one problem

Everything above is what the product does: a character is locked from eight reference angles, each generation conditions on whichever angle its prompt implies, a score checks the result against the reference, and a film is shot one frame-chained shot at a time. What it will and will not generate is set out in the content policy.

How the pipeline works What it costs