Thai legal adviser Paiboon Amonpinyokeat, a member of a legal subcommittee of Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Committee, warned that prompt-led entertainment may be difficult to protect with copyright, the Bangkok Post reported.
The paper said he sees an economic trade-off: AI may reduce production spending, but make it harder for companies to establish ownership or stop rivals from reusing the results. “If prompting alone granted copyright, the world would be flooded with copyright,” he told the newspaper.
Thailand’s Copyright Act defines an author as a person who makes or creates a work. It covers categories including music, films and visual art. The Department of Intellectual Property said in an Aug. 13 statement that Thai law has no AI-specific provisions and that there is no court precedent on using copyrighted material with AI-generated music.
The department’s statement addressed the use of protected material as an AI input, a separate issue from ownership of newly generated output. It said changing a singer’s voice, remixing a song or producing new music with AI could infringe copyright if protected elements are reproduced or adapted without permission and no legal exception applies. The department said the facts of each case matter.
A 2025 report from the U.S. Copyright Office offers a comparison under U.S. law. For technology generally available when the report was issued, the office said prompts alone do not give users sufficient control over expressive elements. It said human-authored elements, such as creative selection, arrangement or modification, may qualify for protection, with contributions assessed case by case.
The U.S. Copyright Office Review Board’s 2023 decision on Jason Allen’s Théâtre D’opéra Spatial provides an earlier example. The board declined to register the work as submitted after Allen would not disclaim its AI-generated material, but did not decide whether his Photoshop edits could qualify independently.
Paiboon urged companies to preserve records of source material, prompts, editing and selection decisions, and AI tool terms, the Bangkok Post reported. The paper said he cautioned that documentation alone does not guarantee copyright protection.
