From Algorithms to Aesthetics: Can AI-Generated Outputs Qualify as Industrial Designs?

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just limited to using algorithms to generate literary summaries, music, video games, film characters, digital paintings and designs. Generative AI (GenAI) has become capable of making decisions across dynamic environments. Today, AI tools are even used to design digital twins of product models that assists in product designing and development, predictive maintenance, process optimization and training alongside stimulation.

The question that comes up here is that will these outputs receive protection under India's industrial design legislation?

Until recently the debate around AI in the context of its interface with Intellectual Property (IP) has majorly been limited to focusing on copyrights, trademarks and patents. While copyright and patent infringements question authorship/inventorship alongside use of existing work for training and stimulation, trademark infringement impinges on unauthorised commercial benefit accrued from use of brand identities including celebrity personalities. But industrial design protection governed by the Designs Act, 2000 has received far less attention in the AI conversation, even as AI tools increasingly generate the very visual outputs the Act was built to protect.

Today, innovation is digital and AI assisted. Many designs first appear as graphical user interfaces, animations, or virtual models before becoming physical products. This raises important questions. Does originality require a human creator? And can AI tools be treated as part of an industrial process under the law? This post inspects whether AI generated or AI assisted designs qualify as "new and original designs" under the Designs Act, 2000? How does the law treat questions of authorship and originality in the context of use of AI for creating designs and does originality require a human creator., and can AI tools be treated as part of an industrial process under the law? Answers to all these questions are juxtaposed with the lessons India can draw from developments in the European Union in regards to the interface of industrial designs with AI.

AI Generated Designs: Rethinking Authorship, Originality, and Ownership

The Designs Act, 2000 defines a "design" under Section 2(d) as the features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornament, or composition of lines or colours applied to any article, by any industrial process, which in the finished article appeal to and are judged solely by the eye. Three requirements are central: the design must be new or original, it must be visual, and it must not be solely dictated by function.

On the face of it, these requirements do not explicitly demand human authorship. The phrase "by any industrial process or means" is broad enough to encompass digital and automated processes. AI tools or purpose-built product design platforms could arguably constitute part of such an industrial process. This interpretive possibility is important: it means that the channel through which a design is produced may not, by itself, disqualify an AI generated output from protection.

The harder question is originality. Under the Act, originality means something originating from the author and/or the designs that are new in their application. The law on ID focuses on granting protection to original designs enhancing the aesthetic appeal in the finished article to which any new or original design has been applied through an industrial process. In addition, the two central requirements are that such design should be visual and must not be a feature dictated solely by functionality. Further, while the Act provisions for an inclusive interpretation of the nature of design to mean any pattern, composition of lines or colours (among others); the process by which such design may be applied to any article may be interpreted broadly. It provides for the use of any industrial process or means, exclusive enough to include digital designs.

The term "author", though undefined under the Act, appears in Section 2(j), in reference to the definition for the term "proprietor" and connects authorship to the vesting of rights, but leaves the concept undefined in isolation. A logical conundrum is that a proprietor should be a person in law, but the same is not entailed as an author. This silence is significant. As things stand today, without legislative amendment, AI cannot be recognised as a designer under the Act, and the emerging judicial and administrative standard appears to require significant human contribution for design registration to succeed.

Yet consider the prompt user: the person who inputs a detailed, carefully crafted prompt into an AI tool to generate a specific visual output. This individual makes deliberate creative choices about the subject matter, the aesthetic, the composition even if the AI executes those choices autonomously. There is a reasonable argument, by analogy to how law treats invention through tools, that such a person functions as the practical author of the resulting design, particularly where the prompt meaningfully shapes the output. The law has not foreclosed this interpretation, but it has not yet confirmed it either.

The European Union's Legal Perspective: A Comparative Benchmark

Recent judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have drawn a clear and instructive distinction between copyright and design law in the context of AI generated output. In the joint cases of Mio (C580/23) and Konektra (C795/23), the CJEU confirmed that copyright protection requires the creator's personal choices and creative input to be expressed in the work itself. Where creation is driven primarily by technical constraints or automated processes leaving little room for creative freedom, the originality requirement for copyright is not met. AI generated output, lacking this human creative imprint, would fail the copyright threshold under EU law.

Design law, however, operates on an entirely different footing. In Deity Shoes (C323/24), the CJEU confirmed that no creative effort from the designer is required; what matters is novelty and individual character. The Court held that even designs based on preexisting catalogue elements, or produced with minimal human input, can qualify for protection. Design law focuses on the final visual product and its distinctiveness, not on the subjective creative process behind it.

To test this principle in practice, IP lawyer Daan Breuking filed an EU design application for a plate generated entirely by Midjourney using the prompt "a picture of a plate with legal images on it," with an explicit declaration that no human modification was involved. The application was accepted and registered as EU Design 0150647980001 demonstrating that AI generated designs are legally protectable under EU design law without any human editing. Crucially, the EU Design Regulation (EUDR) does not define the term "designer," and the CJEU has confirmed that design protection does not presuppose human creative authorship. Even unregistered designs receive the same protection, as long as they are novel, have individual character, and have been made publicly available.

India's design law, at its core, shares some structural similarities with the EU framework, both focusing on visual novelty and the aesthetic impression of the finished article. But India's Act remains anchored to an implied assumption of human authorship, a gap the EU has been able to navigate jurisprudentially.

Use of AI and rising threat of Design Piracy

The risks of AI driven design piracy in India are real and growing. As AI tools allow near instant generation of thousands of design iterations, the ability to replicate the visual character of a registered design without copying the code or process behind it becomes trivially easy. Yet under the Designs Act, infringement is assessed on the basis of visual similarity alone; the role of AI in producing an infringing design is irrelevant to liability. This creates a troubling asymmetry. An AI generated design that copies the visual impression of a registered human created design can constitute infringement. But when an original AI generated design is copied by a competitor, the question of whether the original design was protectable in the first place remains unresolved. Without legislative amendment, the originality and authorship requirements of the Act create real vulnerability for AI generated designs, potentially leaving creators with no enforceable rights even where their design output is genuinely novel and distinctive.

There is also the question of virtual and digital designs. The DPIIT's Concept Note on proposed amendments to the Designs Act, released in January 2026, acknowledges that the Act, framed at a time when design innovation was linked to physical products, does not adequately protect graphical user interfaces, icons, animations, and other digital design assets. The proposed amendments seek to modernise the definitions of "design" and "article" to expressly cover digital, animated, and immersive designs decoupling protection from the requirement of physical embodiment. This is a welcome and overdue reform. However, the it does not directly address the question of AI generated authorship or post-facto infringements, leaving a critical gap even in the proposed reform framework.

The Indian judiciary has shown some early awareness of AI's disruptive potential in the IP space the Delhi High Court has begun engaging with questions at the intersection of AI and creative rights in Thaler v Perlmutter but there is as yet no judicial or regulatory guidance specifically addressing AI generated designs under the Designs Act.

Advancing the Discourse

India's design law reform is at an inflection point. The proposed amendments to the Designs Act, 2026 represent the most significant modernisation of the framework since the Act was enacted. But to be genuinely future ready, the reform must go further and directly engage with the question of AI generated design authorship.

First, the definition of "author" and "designer" under the Act should be amended or clarified to explicitly accommodate AI assisted and AI generated design outputs. At minimum, the law should acknowledge the prompt user or the human operator of an AI tool as the legal author of the resulting design, provided there is prima facie evidence that person's inputs materially shaped the output. This aligns with how design law in the EU has been interpreted, and preserves the essential connection between human agency and legal entitlement without demanding subjective creativity.

Second, India may consider introducing a category of protection for unregistered digital designs, particularly as AI generated outputs often enter the public domain immediately without formal filing.

Finally, enforcement must keep pace. As AI lowers the cost of design piracy exponentially, India should consider strengthening statutory damages for design infringement, a measure already proposed in the 2026 Concept Note while also developing clearer guidance on how AI involvement affects both infringement liability and protectability.

The question "can AI generate a design?" has already been answered by technology. The question India's law must now answer is: "when it does, who owns it, and who can protect it?" Leaving that question unanswered would render genuine creative investment without legal recourse, and expose the design economy to exploitation without remedy.

Author: Dr. Gunjan Chawla Arora and Ashwika M.M, in case of any queries please contact/write back to us via email to chhavi@khuranaandkhurana.com or at  Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorney.

References:1. Accelerating Digital Twin Development With Generative AI: A Framework for 3D Modeling and Data Integration

2. 200016.pdf

3. AI-Generated Designs: Do They Qualify Under Indian Law? | Invntree

4. [Guest Post] The IP protection of AI output - The IPKat

5. India Proposes Major Reform of Design Law - IP Helpdesk

6. Proposed Amendments to the Designs Act, 2000: Transforming India’s Design Law for the Digital and Global Economy - ANM Global

7. Proposed Reforms to India’s Design Protection Framework - Lexology