[Lerc]

>in this case, it's the prompt or conversation he had with the AI. That should definitely be able to be copyrightable, but I agree that the image itself should not.

If you accept that, does that mean source code is copyrightable but compiled code is not?

I'm kind-of ok with the raw output of diffusion models being public domain. It gets more complicated when The process is more than just Text->Image. Artists spending large amounts of time iterating, compositing, inpainting etc. are applying their knowledge of style, design, colour, and lighting.

[drivingmenuts]

Source code for software is pretty exacting - the compiler or interpreter follows discernible rules to reach an end product. An image prompt has a random element to the end result - no one is really able to nail down the rules to describe exactly how the end result is produced. There's not so much creativity, just very abstruse statistical calculation.