[yegortk]

I think this is most significantly a policy issue. Under the existing US law, minor human input could be enough to make AI copyrightable through the "modicum of creativity" argument. However, if this allows for massive amounts of content to be generated (semi-)automatically in much shorter amount of time and with much less effort than what was possible before, it seems strict and generous copyright protections granted to creators of such works by society through the current law are no longer really warranted. In the end, copyright exists to provide motivating reward for creative effort - if such reward is no longer really necessary to enable close-to-infinite creative image generation, the law really may need to be altered to prevent copyright trolls and other nastiness of that nature.

[wisemanwillhear]

If I spend little more than a second framing a picture with my camera, which is less than the time and effort that it would take me to type in a prompt for an AI, does that mean I haven't put in enough effort to have a copyright for my photo?

It feels like we need some distinction that's a little more qualitative than quantitative.