[danShumway]

Which, fine, I'm much more sympathetic to the argument that prompt generation and tuning is creative. I'm not necessarily on-board with it because there are different categories of creativity (APIs and recipes certainly require creativity, but we somewhat arbitrarily classify them as inventions instead), but the point is it's a decent argument for people to make, and I could plausibly see it winning in a court.

I'm just trying to point out, it doesn't have anything to do with the button, or AI, or technology. It's not a good analogy for people to say "you just point a camera at a thing, and that deserves copyright" -- if that was the case, the camera wouldn't get copyright either. Neither prompt-generation nor photography is getting granted copyright based on the decision to press a button, there has to be something more complex going on in both situations for copyright to get involved.

An accidental photograph, a photograph that's made by simply iterating over every possibility in a space, a photograph that's a reconstruction of an existing copyrighted work without changes, etc, etc... none of those are copyrightable, and that they're made with a camera doesn't make them copyrightable. IP law for photography is the same as for anything else; the machine isn't the important part.

In the scenario you describe, if someone mounts a camera someplace and two people press a button and get the exact same photo -- I would be surprised if that second photo has copyright protection, it probably doesn't meet a threshold for human creativity.