What you are actually allowed to publish from AI

Short answer. Three separate questions hide inside this one, and mixing them is expensive. The service contract usually hands you rights to the output. Copyright law may still refuse to protect a purely machine-made result. And if somebody else brings a claim, you are almost certainly paying: one major supplier offers to defend you, and even that comes with a cap.

A note first: this is not legal advice. Every term below is quoted as of this writing and changes without notice, and UAE law is not US law.

What does the service contract say?

Paid tiers hand you the output almost everywhere. Free tiers forbid commercial use almost everywhere.

OpenAI puts it plainly: you own both input and output, to the extent applicable law allows. Commercial use is permitted on every tier, the free one included.

Midjourney works differently, and this is where people trip up. Output from the free trial carries a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. The NC stands for non-commercial. An image created during the trial cannot go into an ad. It cannot go into a client deck or onto packaging either. People try it free, publish the result, then subscribe and consider the matter settled. A licence does not change retroactively.

The same terms carry a threshold that catches agencies once they grow. A company with more than one million dollars in annual gross revenue needs the Pro or Mega plan for commercial use. The threshold counts company revenue, the number of designers has no bearing on it, and the rule reaches affiliated companies too.

One more clause sits in almost every set of terms: the service takes a licence from you for your own material. It needs one to operate and to promote itself, and the wording is often broad. Midjourney output is visible to other users by default, with privacy sold as a separate option.

What does the law say?

A contract cannot create copyright where the law does not grant it.

The US Copyright Office said so directly in January 2025. Copyright does not extend to a purely machine-made result. Nor does it extend to material where a person put too little into how that result looks.

That explains the phrase "to the extent applicable law allows", which sits in almost every set of terms. The company hands you everything it can hand over. If the law finds nothing to protect, there is nothing to hand over.

The consequence is milder than it sounds. You can still use the material: publish it, run it as an ad, print it. What you cannot do is stop your neighbour doing the same after generating something similar. For a marketing banner that rarely matters. For a logo, a character, or anything recognition is built on, it matters a great deal.

Human input changes the position. Selection, reworking, composition and your own photography underneath all raise the odds of protection, and the more of your own decisions the result carries, the better. Courts draw that line, and they are drawing it unevenly so far.

Who pays if a claim arises?

You do, almost everywhere. One major supplier offers to defend you, and the offer is limited.

Adobe does offer indemnification for Firefly output, and the terms deserve to be read in full rather than in summary. Under Adobe's own terms dated 17 June 2025, the protection does not apply to everyone. It applies only to Creative Cloud for teams or Creative Cloud for enterprise customers on a Creative Cloud Pro Plus or Edition 4 plan. The cap is $10,000 per output or per claim. It does not cover claims that arise from modifying the output, combining it with other material, or using it in violation of the terms.

Read that last sentence again if you plan to rely on the protection. Every edit narrows it, and in real work almost everything gets edited: cropped, captioned, assembled from several images into one.

The table is accurate as of this writing. Every supplier listed changed something in the past year, so check before any launch that matters.

What to do on your end

Record what made each published asset, and on which tier.

1. Add one column to your asset file. Tool, plan, date. Thirty seconds per asset, and a year later you can answer a question that is otherwise unanswerable.
2. Check what went out from free tiers. This is the most common risk and the easiest one to fix. You can remake the same asset on a paid plan in an hour, and the issue is settled for good.
3. Sort assets by the cost of being wrong. A feed banner and a logo on a shopfront belong in different categories and deserve different care.
4. Put a line in your contractor agreement. State who holds the rights in what they deliver, and which tools they used to make it.
5. Re-read the terms every six months. Every major supplier changed them last year, and changed them quietly.

We build content production as a system, and in a system the origin of an asset records itself instead of being reconstructed later. That is part of what our content factory is built from.

One last thing, and probably the main one. The risk for ordinary marketing material is low. What costs money is not the generation itself. It is the certainty that the question is closed when nobody ever opened it.