> I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.

Perhaps you're not stretching your imagination enough. What if an expert novelist used an AI like it were a fancy auto-completing dictation machine to write the next great American novel? AI may have "entirely generated" all the text, but what if they micromanaged the shit out it?

I can imagine the difference between someone who fires off a lazy 5 minute prompt, and someone who labors for months and months to get exactly the results they want.