[Multicomp]

I guess I thought that If an image was generated by these tools, at least in the US, the copyright office did not consider it to have any copyright at all, therefore it was by default public domain?

[numpad0]

Note that you can still violate someone else's IP rights, only your side of claims will be null and void if courts determine you're not the creator of content.

[dijksterhuis]

short version in the USA only

* generated without any human interaction/prompting -> not copyrightable.

* with human input/prompting -> it depends.

see this comment in the thread and the child comment providing a link to a report by the US copyright office (read page 2 of the executive summary)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518945