I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment but IMO there's a big difference between someone who types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt. Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.) Or someone who creates art out of smaller components created by AI (e.g. textures.)
Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or not.
For derivative works, there is real effort required to de distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to the original authors it was trained on?
It’s just a new phenomenon that you can get a relatively sophisticated result from a short sentence. But the amount of efforts or iterations doesn’t condition anything here.
