Is it legal to use AI-generated content on my business website?

A couple of months back a client who sells clothes online asked if we could generate all forty product shots for the next season with AI instead of booking the photographer again. It would have saved him something like €3,000 and two weeks of waiting. I told him yes, technically it’s doable, but “legal” and “no problems” aren’t the same question, and answering it properly took more digging than I expected.

The copyright part turns out to be simpler than people think: in Spain and the EU, something generated entirely by AI without human creative input doesn’t get copyright protection, nobody counts as the “author” in the legal sense. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically public domain or free to use however you like, it comes down to the tool’s terms of service. Midjourney, for instance, hands commercial ownership to the paying user; other tools keep it, or share it. Before we drop a single generated image onto a client’s site, I check that specific tool’s terms. I don’t assume they all work the same way.

But what actually worries me isn’t the intellectual property side. It’s resemblance. I explained to the client that an image generator can spit out something that looks too close to an existing stock photo, to a garment with a registered pattern, or, worse, to a real recognizable person, and that’s where you risk infringement or image rights, no matter what the tool’s fine print claims about ownership. Text has the same problem from a different angle: ask a model to write up a product’s technical specs and it invents a certification or a feature the product doesn’t actually have, and now the legal issue isn’t intellectual property at all, it’s misleading advertising, and that lands squarely on the client.

We ended up settling on a middle ground: AI generates the background and composition of the product shots, but the garment itself stays a real photo, composited in, and any generated text goes through a human review pass before it’s published. No inventing features, full stop, because saving on a photographer isn’t worth walking into a lawsuit. We use AI for this blog’s own header images, the code running this site generates them automatically whenever I publish a new post, and I don’t lose sleep over that one because they’re abstract illustrations, not product shots or people, nobody mistakes them for something real.

There’s another angle almost nobody brings up: if a client asks you to never mention anywhere that the content is AI-generated, and someone finds out anyway, the reputational damage usually outweighs whatever the underlying legal risk was. I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t a closed legal verdict, it depends on the tool, the country, and the specific use, but it works as a rule of thumb: the closer the generated thing gets to something or someone identifiable, the closer you are to a problem, legal or just a credibility one.