In 2023, a US federal court ruled that art created solely by AI cannot be copyrighted. It requires human authorship. Yet that same year, the US Copyright Office granted registration to a comic book where AI-generated images were arranged and edited by a human author, protecting the selection and arrangement but not the individual images. The legal landscape is fractured and evolving. Getty Images sued Stability AI for training on its copyrighted photo library without permission. Artists filed class-action lawsuits against Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for using their work as training data. Meanwhile, thousands of creators use AI daily to produce art, music, writing, and designs, operating in a legal gray zone where ownership is uncertain. The stakes are enormous: the creative industries generate over $2.3 trillion annually, and AI is reshaping who creates, who owns, and who profits.