By MICHAEL FISCH
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winter 2026
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In 2021, Krikor Norsigian, JD ’25, traveled to Armenia to volunteer for families displaced by war. He was so inspired by the experience that upon his return he created a hopeful graphic novel based on the Armenian myth of Ara the Beautiful. Over the next four years, he labored over the story as he put himself through Suffolk Law, winning an intellectual property (IP) pitch competition from Suffolk’s Center for Entrepreneurship in November 2024 that included registering the copyright for his work.
There was one problem. Norsigian had made only rough sketches of the artwork for his novel, relying on the AI tool Midjourney to fill in the details and create lush, colorful illustrations. “There has been a lot of controversy over AI artwork,” says Professor Darrell Mottley, Faculty Director of the Intellectual Property & Entrepreneurship Clinic (IPEC), who aided in Norsigian’s registration. “Could the AI system be included as an author in the work? Is this human creativity or not?”
In January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office issued new guidance declaring that outputs of purely generative AI tools could not be copyrighted. It essentially argued that, even with human sketches and detailed prompts, AI will not create the same image each time, so it isn’t a unique work that can be copyrighted. If Norsigian was to protect his work, he’d have to differentiate what was AI generated and what was not. Two IPEC students, Zoe Lyon and Patrick Madaya, threw themselves into the task, working with Norsigian to brave unknown territory and submit one of the first copyright applications under the new rules.
“What struck me the most was how the real copyright issues weren’t about AI itself, but about where the human choices came in—what the client wrote, how they curated and arranged the images, and what they edited,” Lyon says. She and Madaya were able to write an application for Norsigian’s words and sketches, even as it excluded the final artwork, earning copyright protection this past August.
Mottley understands the reasoning of the Copyright Office. At the same time, he says, copyright law has adapted to other technological tools such as computer-generated images (CGI) in film. As AI becomes a more common tool, it may be practically impossible to differentiate AI from human creativity in collaborative works, and a lack of ability to copyright works created with the tool could have a chilling effect on creative output, he argues.
“Without protection, someone could take all the images and use them without permission,” says Mottley, who is currently writing a paper on the topic. “While there are arguments on both sides, the law needs to evolve with the technology. If you look at Krikor’s novel, the whole thing is well done, and without the AI system he probably couldn’t have come up with the robust imagery. He shouldn’t have to exclude the images as part of the whole product. But, unfortunately, that’s where the law is—unless the U.S. Supreme Court decides that works outputted by an AI system can be copyrighted.”
Photography: Michael J. Clarke
“There has been a lot of controversy over AI artwork. Could the AI system be included as an author in the work? Is this human creativity or not?”
Professor Darrell Mottley, Faculty Director of the Intellectual Property & Entrepreneurship Clinic (IPEC)
law of technology
By Michael Blanding
