AI-Generated Images & Copyright
AI-generated images are graphics produced by an image model from a prompt. Under Austrian copyright law the author is the person who created the work, so a purely machine-generated image without a defining human creative contribution is generally not regarded as a protected work. Whether and how you may use such an image then follows from the provider's terms and from third-party rights in what the image shows.
In practice
There are two practical consequences for businesses. First, a logo or core brand motif produced purely by generation is hard to defend against imitators under copyright, which is a real risk for protectable core assets and largely irrelevant for background graphics or blog illustration. Trade mark protection is independent of this: a generated logo can still be registered as a trade mark and then enforced against imitators. Second, the provider's terms of use separately govern what you may do commercially and do not substitute for the missing copyright position; you should also check whether the output contains identifiable people, brands or protected buildings, because the usual rules apply regardless of how the image was made. The EU AI Act contains transparency duties for artificially generated or manipulated content in Article 50, and these have applied since 2 August 2026. The machine-readable marking is primarily a duty of the providers of the AI systems; a disclosure duty for users applies above all to convincingly realistic depictions of people and events. Provenance data under the C2PA standard is one widely used technical means of carrying such a marking with the file. Decide internally where generated images are acceptable, and write it down.