AI-made pictures in a business

A firm or a charity can now make a picture with an AI tool. The picture then goes on a website, into an advert or onto a leaflet. Before it does, the people sending it out check it for mistakes, size it and describe it. They also need to know who owns it, and whether the advertising rules apply.

Look closely before you use it

Read the picture as a stranger would. Count the fingers on any hands. Read every word in it, letter by letter. Look for logos or brand marks that belong to someone else. If a face looks like a real person, make sure that person has agreed.

Sizes and alt text

GOV.UK's guidance for its own publishers gives two rules. They "avoid using images with text", because it makes the picture harder for some people to understand. And they make each image at least "960 pixels wide by 640 pixels high at 72 DPI".

The Web Accessibility Initiative at W3C says images must have text alternatives that describe the information or function they carry. A picture that is only decoration gets an empty alt attribute (alt="").

Show where it came from

Some firms want to show readers how a picture was made. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) publishes "an open technical standard for publishers, creators and consumers to establish the origin and edits of digital content". The standard is called Content Credentials.

Ofcom published a discussion paper on deepfakes on 23 July 2024. It looks at measures such as "deploying watermarking techniques and deepfake detection classifiers". Ofcom writes these papers to share its research and encourage debate.

Who owns the picture

UK copyright law has a rule for work made by a computer. Section 9(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 says that for a computer-generated work, "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken".

The government's report of March 2026 explains how that rule works. For a general purpose AI that answers a prompt, it says the "author" will usually be the person who typed the prompt. It says this protection lasts for 50 years from the date of creation. The report also says the rule is uncertain in practice, because no court has yet decided how a picture made wholly by a machine can count as original.

Each AI tool has its own terms of use as well. Read them alongside the law.

The government asked for views on copyright and AI. Its consultation ran from 17 December 2024 to 25 February 2025.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Intellectual Property Office published their report on 18 March 2026. On work made by a computer with no human author, it says "we propose that this specific type of protection should be removed, while copyright should continue to protect works created with AI assistance". The government has proposed this. Section 9 still reads the same on legislation.gov.uk, checked on 29 October 2026.

Adverts and the rules

The Committee of Advertising Practice wrote about AI in adverts on 31 August 2023. Its rules apply "regardless of how the ad was created". If AI images were used to make efficacy claims, it says, "there is the potential for them to mislead". The advertiser keeps the primary responsibility for the advert, even when a machine made it.

Useful links