> AI slop isn't copyrightable, but there can be copyrightable elements in an AI-generated image. The most obvious element is the prompt. So long as your prompt contains some quantum of creativity (e.g. "Make me a beautiful flower whose loveliness is reminiscent of a newborn baby", but not "make me a beautiful flower"), that prompt is copyrightable. That means you can use copyright to challenge others' rights to present the same prompt to a chatbot. But while the prompt can be copyrighted, the image it gives rise to isn't. So you can spend a month iteratively refining your prompt, consuming all your town's water along with 200,000 gallons of diesel and that prompt will be yours for your life plus 70 years, but the image it generates is in the public domain, and anyone can copy it, sell it or give it away

I don't find this line of thought very convincing. The more detailed the prompt is, the more control the author exercises over the result. A sufficiently detailed prompt may become indistingushable from source code, because it specifies the desired result so precisely that it acts like source code for a compiler. Compilers, too, are not necessarily deterministic. Compilers may have a lot of freedom in how they translate the source code into machine instructions, but this does not break the connection with the original human intellectual effort and the result remains copyrightable.

There should be a difference between asking AI to "draw a funny picture of a donkey", and spending a month iteratively refining your prompt.