You don’t have to be smarter than a fifth grader (or even a first grader) to commit potential copyright infringement using AI tools. One IP attorney watched over the weekend as his young son built a bedtime story generator that used copyrighted characters without permission.
“When experimenting with Google’s AI Studio over the weekend, my 6-year-old son had the idea to create a website that would tell stories and generate pictures of the story,” US IP lawyer Jonathan Menkes, a partner at the Knobbe Martens law firm, explained in a blog post. “In less than 2 minutes, he created a fully interactive website, including the proposed name ‘Bedtime Story Weaver.'”
All it took to get Menkes the younger to create his tool was a few basic prompts that were “so simple, even a six-year-old with zero coding experience” was able to create a web app asking users to provide a target age, theme, characters, an optional morale or lesson, learning objective, preferred story length, and tone, to get an instant AI-penned tale.
First up, Menkes’ son generated a story about a dragon and knight, which came with an accompanying photo. So far, so good, Menkes explained, “but my son’s imagination did not stop there.”
Next he prompted his vibe-coded story generator to give him a story about video game character Sonic the Hedgehog going on an adventure with Nintendo’s mascot, Mario. A few more details added, and boom: Google AI Studio’s custom website spit out a story about Sonic and Mario questing for coins.
“As an IP attorney, this was jaw-dropping,” Menkes said. “My sweet little son unwittingly created something that I spent over a decade of my life preventing others from doing.”
The evolution of a legal arms race
El Reg readers probably aren’t surprised to find that AI-enabled copyright infringement is so simple – we’ve covered it multiple times of late, most recently with OpenAI’s Sora making it a snap for anyone to place copyrighted characters into custom scenarios without the permission of holders of those IPs. Menkes said that the incident with his son illustrates that not everyone in the IP space is prepared to face the myriad challenges stemming from AI tools.
“As IP practitioners, we need to understand how this technology works and anticipate the problems and opportunities it affords,” Menkes told The Register in an email. “This is exactly what happened to me over the weekend when having a bonding moment with my son.”
While there are plenty of concerns to be had over how AI companies are using and misusing copyrighted content to train their models, Menkes posits his bedtime story incident as one that should alarm IP holders regardless of what AI companies are doing.
“Intellectual property holders … should be prepared for a potential tsunami of software applications and websites that push the boundaries of current IP law,” Menkes warned.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/03/ai_has_made_ip_violations/
Sound the Alarm! How My 6-Year Old Almost Became a Copyright Pirate Overnight
