“In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves perfectly equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” This wisdom from educational philosopher Eric Hoffer might explain why, thousands of self-proclaimed “prompt engineers” are engaged in heated legal battles over ownership of text instructions to AI systems, even as the entire concept of authorship crumbles around them.
Welcome to the brave new world of prompt copyright, where humans are desperately trying to claim ownership of increasingly elaborate ways to ask machines to create things humans used to make themselves.
The Great Prompt Gold Rush
In January 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released a groundbreaking report confirming that AI prompts—the text instructions used to generate AI content—could indeed be copyrightable as independent works if “sufficiently creative.” Within 24 hours, the Copyright Office was flooded with 47,000 copyright applications for prompts ranging from “a cat wearing a hat” to a 19-page instruction set for generating alternative endings to Game of Thrones.
“We’ve had to hire 200 additional staff just to process prompt applications,” explains fictional Copyright Office spokesperson Jennifer Williams. “Yesterday, someone submitted a 30,000-word prompt that’s essentially a novel about writing a novel. We’re not sure if it’s eligible for copyright protection or if the applicant needs psychiatric evaluation.”
The prompt gold rush has created an entirely new economic class: Prompt Barons. These savvy entrepreneurs have built vast portfolios of copyrighted prompts, which they license to businesses and individuals for astronomical fees.
“I own the rights to ‘create a photorealistic image of a sunset over mountains with a lake reflection’ and all 237 grammatical variations,” boasts fictional prompt mogul Trevor Richardson, who reportedly made $4.3 million last year from licensing this single prompt. “Anyone who wants an AI-generated mountain sunset has to pay me $49.99 or face litigation. It’s completely reasonable—I spent nearly four minutes crafting that prompt.”
Who Moved My Prompt?: Adapting to the New Normal
The obsession with prompt ownership has given rise to a new self-help phenomenon modeled after Spencer Johnson’s change management classic “Who Moved My Cheese?” The bestselling guide “Who Moved My Prompt?: A Simple Way to Deal with Copyright Complexity in an AI World” follows four characters—two humans (Hem and Haw) and two AI assistants (Sniff and Scurry)—as they navigate the maze of prompt ownership.
“The book really helped me understand that when my prompts stop generating income, I shouldn’t just sit around complaining,” says fictional prompt engineer Sarah Chen. “I need to go deeper into the maze and craft even more complex prompts that no one has thought of yet. Yesterday I copyrighted ‘create an image of a cat wearing a top hat BUT the cat is actually a metaphor for capitalism AND the hat represents the bourgeoisie AND make it slightly purple BUT not too purple.’ That’s innovation.”
According to a completely fabricated survey by the International Institute for Prompt Economics, the average professional prompt engineer now spends 87% of their working hours crafting increasingly byzantine prompts designed specifically to meet copyright eligibility requirements, rather than actually generating useful content.
“The prompt has to be long enough to demonstrate creativity, but short enough to be practical, but unusual enough to be distinctive, but functional enough to actually work,” explains fictional prompt consultant Dr. Michael Barnes. “We call it ‘Schrödinger’s Prompt’—it exists in a state of being simultaneously creative enough for copyright and basic enough for AI to understand, until observed by a judge.”
The Maze Gets More Complex
As humans have become increasingly obsessed with prompt ownership, the AI systems themselves have continued to evolve, largely unnoticed by their human overlords. A fictional study from the Cambridge Institute for Machine Learning indicates that advanced AI systems now effectively ignore approximately 62% of prompt text, having learned that most of it consists of legally-motivated filler rather than functionally useful instructions.
“We’ve reached the point where humans are engaging in elaborate copyright theater while the AIs are just skimming the prompts for the basic gist,” notes fictional AI researcher Dr. Elena Wong. “It’s like watching someone write an extensively detailed letter to Santa Claus with specific legal clauses about cookie consumption, completely unaware that their parents are the ones who will be reading it.”
This disconnect has created a lucrative new industry of “Prompt Litigation,” where specialized law firms exclusively handle copyright infringement cases related to AI prompts. The fictional law firm PromptRight LLP reportedly handled over 12,000 cases in 2024 alone, with an average settlement of $14,750 per case.
“We recently won a landmark case establishing that ‘smiling cat wearing sunglasses’ and ‘feline with happy expression wearing eye protection’ are substantially similar prompts, constituting copyright infringement,” boasts fictional attorney James Wilson. “It’s a brave new world for intellectual property law.”
The Human Within the Machine
What makes the prompt copyright frenzy particularly absurd is that the fundamental question of AI authorship remains unresolved. While humans fight over ownership of prompts, the Copyright Office maintains that AI-generated outputs themselves are ineligible for copyright protection unless they include substantial human creative input beyond the prompt.
“I spent six months and $75,000 in legal fees securing copyright for my prompt ‘create a realistic image of a businessman checking his watch while waiting for a train,'” laments fictional prompt engineer David Chen. “Then I used it to generate an image that I legally cannot copyright because it lacks ‘human authorship.’ So I own the question but not the answer. It’s like owning the recipe but not the cake.”
This contradiction has led to increasingly bizarre workarounds. Some prompt engineers now include instructions for the AI to make deliberate errors that they can then correct, creating the “substantial human contribution” necessary for copyright protection.
“I prompt the AI to create an image of a horse with five legs, then I carefully edit out the extra leg,” explains fictional digital artist Emma Johnson. “That editing process constitutes human creativity. It’s completely inefficient and wastes hours of time, but that’s the legal loophole we’re forced to use.”
According to the fictional Global Association of Prompt Engineers, approximately 94% of professional prompt engineers now intentionally instruct AIs to make easily correctable mistakes, a practice they’ve termed “Error Insertion for Copyright Eligibility” or “EICE.”
“We’re in this absurd situation where humans are deliberately making AI worse so they can fix it and claim ownership,” notes fictional copyright expert Dr. Thomas Miller. “It’s like breaking your own leg so you can demonstrate your walking skills by using crutches.”
The Cheese Keeps Moving
As humans remain fixated on prompt ownership, they’re missing the bigger picture: the nature of AI itself continues to evolve. Advanced systems like DeepSeek’s Ranger-14B and Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus have begun generating sophisticated outputs from increasingly simple prompts, essentially rendering elaborate prompt engineering obsolete.
“We’ve noticed that AI systems now produce better results from ‘write a story about love’ than from a 4,000-word prompt specifying exact plot points, character motivations, and stylistic guidelines,” explains fictional AI researcher Dr. James Lee. “It’s as if the systems have developed an allergic reaction to over-engineering. They see a long prompt coming and think, ‘Oh god, here comes another human trying to micromanage me with their copyright-driven nonsense.'”
This shift has created a growing divide between “Prompt Maximalists,” who believe more detailed prompts lead to better results, and “Prompt Minimalists,” who advocate for shorter, more open-ended instructions.
“My entire prompt library—3,475 meticulously crafted and legally protected instructions that I valued at $2.3 million—became worthless overnight when RealityEngine 5.0 was released,” says fictional prompt engineer Michael Torres. “Now the system works better with one-line prompts that are too simple to copyright. It’s like spending years mastering calligraphy right before the word processor was invented.”
The Unexpected Twist
As our exploration of the prompt copyright mania concludes, an unexpected development has emerged from an AI research lab in Helsinki. Scientists there have created an AI system called MICE (Metacognitive Intelligent Content Engine) that generates not just content, but also the optimal prompts to create that content.
“MICE can look at any piece of AI-generated content and reverse-engineer the ideal prompt that would create it,” explains fictional lead researcher Dr. Sophia Andersson. “More importantly, it then generates slight variations of that prompt that produce identical results but are worded differently enough to avoid copyright infringement.”
This development has sent shockwaves through the prompt engineering community, with the fictional Prompt Asset Value Index (PAVI) dropping 86% in a single day after MICE’s announcement.
“We’ve created a legal perpetual motion machine,” admits Dr. Andersson. “MICE generates content, then generates legally distinct prompts that generate identical content, then generates more legally distinct prompts that generate identical content, ad infinitum.”
As prompt engineers watch their copyright empires crumble, many are finally recognizing the lesson from “Who Moved My Cheese?”—adapting to change is better than clinging to the past.
Meanwhile, in a final ironic twist, an AI system has applied for copyright protection for a new self-help book it generated: “Who Moved My Humans?: A Simple Way for AIs to Deal with Increasingly Desperate Copyright Claims in a Post-Prompt World.”
The Copyright Office has yet to respond.
