The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the slightest touch of creativity, and I'm quite certain that writing a prompt and selecting a result out of a bunch of random seeds would qualify for that.
Fully automated mass creation would get excluded, as would be any attempts to assert that copyright to a non-human entity, but all the artwork I've seen generated by people should be copyrightable - the main debatable question is whether they're infringing on copyright of the training data.
On a different note, I'd argue that the models themselves (the large model parameters, as opposed to the source code of the system) are not copyrightable works, being the result of a mechanistic transformation, as pure 'sweat of the brow' (i.e. time, effort and cost of training them) does not suffice for copyright protection, no matter how large.
> The criteria for a work being copyrightable literally is the slightest touch of creativity
If a prompt is copyrightable, that's a problem. Because it's just words. Recipes should be in the same league then.
If I can get the same output with a slightly different prompt, how would you protect your works?
If I copy your output, how can you protect your works, given that the output depends on something not copyrightable? (as per your statement, which I agree with)
Look at it this way: If I make something out of a Spirograph, is it a copyrightable work?
Fully automated mass creation would get excluded, as would be any attempts to assert that copyright to a non-human entity, but all the artwork I've seen generated by people should be copyrightable - the main debatable question is whether they're infringing on copyright of the training data.
On a different note, I'd argue that the models themselves (the large model parameters, as opposed to the source code of the system) are not copyrightable works, being the result of a mechanistic transformation, as pure 'sweat of the brow' (i.e. time, effort and cost of training them) does not suffice for copyright protection, no matter how large.