To A.I., or not to A.I.?

That is no question for the Ames Marketing Department—or you!

You may know that the Ames Corporate Marketing team creates publications including the Angle and the Ames Calendar; content for our website and social media; and promotional materials for business development and recruitment. The team creates the 1962 eNewsletter you are reading right now.

What you may not know is that this department generates a great deal of original art (text and graphics) and purchases thousands of images each year. The team goes to great lengths to ensure that Ames owns the copyright to all of these assets.

You may also not know that to protect the copyright for our content, the department does NOT use A.I., as tempting as it is. We ask you to follow this guidance with any Ames asset. Here's why:

Who owns the art?

When you use original art (any type of content) to create something completely different, you have, in effect, created derivative art. Derivative art created by a person is considered new art and is copyrightable. Hopefully, in creating the derivative art, you used your own original art or purchased the rights to the source material to avoid copyright infringement issues. Nevertheless, you have new art that is copyrightable.

The current position of the U.S. Copyright Office is that derivative art generated by A.I. is not copyrightable. Where this gets messy is when you use A.I. to help develop new art. This is what you do when you use Adobe Photoshop’s generative A.I. tools to add work gloves to a photo or use Chat GPT to revise copy for a brochure.

The crux of the matter is: Who owns the art? Is it you, Adobe, or Chat GPT? And is it even copyrightable?

The U.S. Copyright Office is actively investigating the impact of A.I. on copyright law and policy, and numerous lawsuits are in progress. Until the copyright question is resolved, the Ames marketing team will not use A.I. in any form. In addition, the official policy of the Ames I.T. department is that A.I. should not be used on any Ames device because it poses a security risk.  

The bottom line: If you are using Ames assets, please do not use A.I.