A battle over 'Italian brainrot' could shape who owns AI art

Tung Tung Sahur, one of the world's best-known "Italian brainrot" characters, was created using seven prompts in an AI image generator. A legal battle is underway to determine who, if anyone, can claim ownership. AFP via Getty Images/Collage by Emily Bogle/NPR hide caption

Around the world, kids are going crazy for a set of characters collectively known as "Italian brainrot." These memes are generated using artificial intelligence, and they're appearing on social media and YouTube, as well as in video games.

Now their popularity has sparked a fight over who, if anyone, owns them.

A legal battle unfolding in a California courtroom could determine whether several prominent brainrot characters can be used in games and other media without paying or acknowledging their creators. On one side is a company that made a hit game using Italian brainrot characters. On the other is a French startup representing the young creators of several of the characters that appear in the game. At stake is potentially many millions of dollars in revenue.

The legal battle comes at a crossroads for AI-generated art and raises the question of whether prompts to a chatbot can be considered artistic expression. A 2024 case ruled that a chatbot cannot be the sole inventor of a product or piece of art, and it left open the possibility of humans using AI to produce copyrightable works. Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office affirmed that AI-assisted work could be copyrighted but added: "Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis."

"We're still in the middle of figuring out, as a copyright matter, how much human involvement there has to be" for AI art to be legally protected, said Mark McKenna, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who co-directs the university's Institute for Technology, Law and Policy. McKenna thinks the day will come when an AI drawing, story or song is copyrighted, but he said, "I don't have some specific prediction of how many prompts it's going to take."

Italian brainrot burst forth on the internet in early 2025. The memes are weird, AI-generated characters with faux Italian-sounding names. A cow with the body of the planet Saturn and large human feet is known as La Vaca Saturno Saturnita , while a frothy coffee in a tutu is called Ballerina Cappuccina .

Grown-ups can find Italian brainrot confusing, but kids love the Dadaist characters. And sensing an opportunity, products geared toward a younger audience are regularly using brainrot characters.