AI art and copyright: what you own when you make comics with AI

Before you publish a comic whose panels were drawn by an AI model, it is worth knowing what you own. There are two separate questions. The first is what the agreement between you and MangaMade says, and that answer is simple. The second is what copyright law protects, and there the honest answer is that it depends on where you are and is still being worked out. This article covers both, then the rules on original characters and on disclosing AI use.

What MangaMade’s terms say

The terms of service separate what you bring from what you make:

• What you bring stays yours. You keep every right you already have in your stories, scripts, character descriptions and reference images, and you give MangaMade the licence it needs to store them and run them through planning, drawing, lettering and export for your workspace.
• What you make belongs to you. As between you and MangaMade, the pages, panels, lettering and exports you make belong to you, to the extent the law allows, and you may publish them, commercially included. MangaMade claims no ownership of them.
• MangaMade keeps a narrow licence. It covers only rendering, storing and serving your work for you, such as composing pages, showing them in the editor and delivering exports and share links, and it ends when you delete the work.
• No one is promised exclusivity in a generated image. Similar descriptions can produce similar images for other users, so MangaMade cannot promise that anyone holds an exclusive right in a generated picture.

People also ask about training. The privacy policy states that MangaMade does not use your stories, characters or pages to train its own models. To plan and draw a chapter, parts of your content are sent to specialised AI providers, each under a data processing agreement or equivalent terms, and only for the task at hand.

The human-authorship question

A contract can settle who owns what between two parties. It cannot create a copyright that the law does not recognise, and that is the part still in motion.

In many jurisdictions, copyright protects only works that have a human author. Where that rule applies, an image a model generates from a text description may not be protected on its own, or only narrowly, because the person who wrote the description did not determine the picture the way an illustrator determines a drawing. Some copyright authorities have said that a prompt alone does not make someone the author of the resulting image.

Other countries approach it differently. A few have rules for computer-generated works that treat the person who made the arrangements for the work as its author, and whether those rules fit today’s image models is debated. Courts have not all drawn the line in the same place either. Lawmakers, courts and copyright authorities are revisiting these questions, so what holds today may change, and it may differ between the country where you live and the one where you publish.

The parts that are clearly yours

Whatever the status of a single generated panel, a chapter made with MangaMade contains a great deal of plain human authorship. These are the parts most clearly yours:

• The story: your premise, your world, your plot and the way the chapter paces it.
• The script: the page and panel breakdown you review and edit, and every line of dialogue and every caption.
• Your characters as you write them: their names, personalities, histories and relationships.
• The arrangement: which panels each page holds, in which layout and order, and which version of each panel you chose to keep.
• The lettering: the words on the page, where each balloon sits, its kind and its size.
• Reference art you drew yourself, which is protected like any of your drawings.

In general, the more of the finished chapter that comes from your own writing and choices, the more of it rests on human authorship. Keep your drafts, notes and scripts: they show what you contributed if the question ever comes up. In most countries copyright arises without any registration; where a registration system exists, it may ask you to identify material generated with AI and to claim only what you made yourself.

Original characters only

Owning your pages only helps if what they show is yours to begin with. That is why the acceptable use policy limits MangaMade to original characters:

• No characters from other people’s series, and no franchises, logos or trademarks, whether you name them, describe them or upload them.
• No real, identifiable people as characters, celebrities and public figures included; photos of real people are not accepted as character references.
• No requests for the style of a named artist or studio. The style presets describe a look in generic words, never whose look it is.
• Reference art must be your own work, or art you have the right to use.

Every series, cast and chapter script is screened automatically before a plan is accepted and before any credit is reserved, and a refusal names the category and the line that triggered it. Screening is imperfect, and a look-alike description can slip past it, so the responsibility stays with you: a comic built on someone else’s character is not yours to publish, whoever drew it. If you find a comic made with MangaMade that copies your characters or artwork, write to abuse@mangamade.com; when a report is justified, content MangaMade hosts, such as a shared chapter, is taken down.

Disclosing AI use

The panel art in a MangaMade chapter is generated with AI, and the acceptable use policy asks you to say so when you publish. Disclosure protects you as much as your readers: many platforms, publishers and contests ask how work was made, and some restrict or refuse AI-generated work.

• Credit the art honestly in your series description or credits page, for example: “Story and lettering by [your name]; art generated with AI in MangaMade.”
• Use the platform’s own AI-content label or setting when you upload, and follow its rules on AI-generated work.
• Tell publishers, contests and printers how the pages were made.
• Never present generated pages as hand-drawn, or as the work of a named artist.
• Do not crop or remove the trial watermark; a paid plan removes it.

Before you publish

1. Check your cast and pages for any resemblance to existing characters or artwork.
2. Write your credit line and set the platform’s AI label.
3. Read the rules of the platform, publisher or contest on AI-generated work.
4. Keep your story drafts, scripts and notes.
5. Talk to a lawyer before you sign a publishing, licensing or merchandise deal.

This is not legal advice

This article explains MangaMade’s terms and the general state of the law at the time of writing, in plain words. It is not legal advice and cannot account for your country or your situation. Copyright rules differ from one country to the next and are changing quickly where AI is concerned. For a contract, a dispute, a registration or any decision with money at stake, consult a lawyer qualified where you live or publish. The binding texts are the terms of service and the acceptable use and AI disclosure policy.