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If you have used ChatGPT, Midjourney, or any other AI tool to help produce content in Kenya, a recent ruling from the Copyright Tribunal should get your attention. For the first time, Kenya's copyright authority has had to answer a question the law never explicitly addressed: does AI-generated content qualify for copyright protection, and if so, who owns it?
The short answer is that AI cannot own copyright, and neither can you, unless you can prove you did the creative heavy lifting yourself.
The Case That Forced the Question
The ruling came out of a dispute between Aryeh Movement Limited and Cynthia Beldina Akoth Okello, an author who had been contracted to write a series of Bible Scripture Stories. Beldina used AI tools to help generate some of the content for the project.
When her working relationship with Aryeh broke down, she discovered that the company had registered the literary works with the Kenya Copyright Board (Kecobo) under its own name, not hers. She had not consented to this, nor had she transferred ownership of the works to Aryeh.
Beldina filed a complaint with Kecobo seeking to have Aryeh's registration revoked. Kecobo agreed and pulled the certificate. Aryeh appealed the decision, and that appeal is what landed the matter before the Copyright Tribunal as case COPTA/E001/2025, officially titled Aryeh Movement Limited v. Cynthia Beldina Akoth Okello.
What started as a straightforward ownership and registration dispute quickly became something bigger: Kenya's first real test of how AI fits into copyright law.
What the Tribunal Actually Decided
The Tribunal's reasoning rests on a simple but important idea. Kenya's Copyright Act defines an author as the person who first creates a work, and the Tribunal held that this definition only recognises human authorship. AI, no matter how sophisticated, does not have the legal personality required to be an author, and it cannot own copyright.
That does not mean using AI disqualifies your work from protection. The Tribunal was clear that creators remain free to use tools like ChatGPT or image generators during the creative process. The issue is how much of the final work is actually yours.
The legal test comes from Section 22(3) of the Copyright Act, which requires that a literary, musical, or artistic work have "sufficient effort" put into it to give it an original character. That requirement was written long before generative AI existed, but the Tribunal applied it directly to AI-assisted work. If a human author can demonstrate substantial creative contribution, meaning judgment, editing, structure, and original ideas that shaped the final product, the work can still be copyrighted. If AI did most of the heavy lifting and the human only prompted or lightly edited, the work does not meet the threshold.
In this case, neither Aryeh nor Beldina could clear that bar. The evidence presented did not clearly establish who did what, so the Tribunal declined to rule on authorship altogether and sent the parties back to sort it out between themselves.
Kecobo's Role Got Clarified Too
The Tribunal found that Kecobo had overstepped its mandate when it tried to resolve the ownership dispute by revoking Aryeh's registration certificate. According to the Tribunal, Kecobo's job is limited to maintaining the copyright register. It is not the body that decides who owns a disputed work. That responsibility belongs to the courts or other competent judicial bodies.
This is a useful correction for anyone who assumes a complaint to Kecobo will settle an ownership dispute. It will not. If you and a client, employer, or collaborator disagree over who owns a piece of AI-assisted work, you are looking at a court case, not a regulatory fix.
What This Means If You Use AI in Your Work
For Kenya's growing community of writers, illustrators, musicians, and content creators experimenting with AI tools, this ruling draws a clear line. AI can be a collaborator in your process, but it cannot be a co-owner, and it cannot turn someone else's creative labour into something they can register and claim as their own.
Intellectual property lawyer Manasses Mwangi, who was not involved in this case but has commented on the broader legal landscape, puts it plainly: creators cannot claim copyright when AI is responsible for the substantial creative output of a work, even if they were the one who initiated the process. The way to protect AI-assisted work, he explains, is to treat AI as a refining tool rather than the primary creator, similar to how a researcher might credit interview subjects in an academic paper without losing ownership of the final piece.
That distinction is worth sitting with. It suggests the safest approach is not to avoid AI altogether, but to be deliberate about where it sits in your workflow. Use it to draft, translate, or polish, but make sure the ideas, structure, and final judgment calls are visibly yours.
Practical Steps to Protect AI-Assisted Work
Given where the law currently stands, a few habits can make a real difference if your ownership is ever challenged:
Keep your drafts and revision history. Early outlines, handwritten notes, or version histories in a word processor are evidence of your own creative input.
Save your prompts, but do not rely on them alone. Prompts show intent, but they do not prove authorship on their own. What matters more is what you did with the AI's output afterward.
Get agreements in writing. If you are producing work for a client or employer, have a contract that clearly states who owns the final output and what role AI played. The Tribunal noted that Aryeh's failure to produce a clear commissioning agreement was one of the reasons its case fell apart.
Document your edits. If you substantially rewrite, restructure, or add original material to AI-generated drafts, keep records showing that process. It is the difference between "AI wrote this" and "I used AI to help me write this."
The Bigger Picture
This ruling puts Kenya in step with a broader global trend. Copyright authorities in other jurisdictions, including the United States, have taken a similar position that human authorship is the foundation of copyright protection, and that purely AI-generated output does not qualify. What makes the Kenyan case notable is that it is grounded entirely in existing law. The Tribunal did not need new legislation to reach its conclusion. It simply applied Section 22(3) of the Copyright Act, a provision written for a pre-AI world, to a very modern dispute.
For now, the message to Kenyan creators is straightforward. AI is a tool you can use freely, but it will never be your co-author in the eyes of the law. Ownership still belongs to the human who did the thinking, and if you want to keep that ownership, you need to be able to prove it.
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