Here is a question that sounds trivial and isn’t. You open an image generator, type a careful prompt, tweak it twenty times, and get a picture you’re rather proud of. Do you own it? Most people assume yes — you did the work, you had the idea, you pressed the button. In the United States, the answer is a flat no: you own the copyright to precisely none of the AI-generated image, and that has real consequences the first time someone else decides to use it. Answer first, and then the nuance, bec...