I don't think this is the correct interpretation. I think they mean that if you make something without AI and then modify that with AI, that's covered. Likewise, if you start from an AI output and modify it, that's covered.

But the pure output of a generative model cannot be copyrighted, regardless of how complex the prompt is (note that the prompt itself could be copyrighted).

> A prompt can be a masterpiece.

So the true Renaissance artists are the Medicis and the RC church?

> how much creativity and effort

So art is art prompting, or is it creativity and effort? If some toddler spends two hours on a drawing, it's a masterpiece?

> AI can be used as another kind of brush.

A simile does not a truth make.

> a prompt can be a masterpiece.

Then copywrite the prompt, that's always been allowed. Should be just as good if that's the true masterpiece.

Or, as I think we all know, it's not. It's merely a commission, the product is the output. Not the prompt.

The outputs of a camera can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an photographic image, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the image, but not the mere pointing of a lens and adjustment of setting.

> AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

Sorry, but... cringe. If we are calling prompts "masterpieces" now - letting alone the image generated by it - maybe we don't deserve art at all.

>>A prompt can be a masterpiece.

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

You have an extremely low bar for calling something a masterpiece.

A prompt can be clever, insightful, unique, and even uniquely productive.

But it is nowhere near the level of decades-deep skill and creative inspiration required to create art anything worthy of the label "masterpiece".

>>AI can be used as another kind of brush

Perhaps that is a valid analogy, but we do not give copyrights to brushes, no matter how much cost or effort was required to make the brush. The brush is not the only tool required to make the art. To continue the analogy, the artist must also select and mount the canvas, mix and color each shade of paint, build up the base layers, and on and on and on...

It doesn't matter if your "brush" is a five hundred billion dollar machine and you spend six months whispering to it to find just the right incantation to generate your file of pixels — SCOTUS is right, you have not make art to which you can claim a copyright.

And the starving student artist in their garage mixing their paints and using the dollar-store brush did make art worthy of a copyright claim.

>> I disagree with this approach because I've seen how much creativity and effort some people can put into slowly evolving a single elaborate prompt. AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece.

Absolute nonsense. A work of art is made of semantic stratification, experience, thought process. A prompt lacks all that. AI art can be a tool, but this sentence is a good reminder that on average it’s worth shit all.

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> AI can be used as another kind of brush. A prompt can be a masterpiece

What a joke. No, AI is not a brush, it is a slop machine that spits out derivatives of the actual masters. If you go back and forth with a human artist about a commission where you keep nitpicking and wanting adjustments, does that make you the artist? No, it makes you the “ideas guy”