About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike the pareidolia tendency that’s led to humans assigning agency to every other inanimate object that’s ever sparked an emotional reaction in us too.
With image AI there are structural editing tools that can include the creator drawing guide images. I think there's a point at which this makes things a bit more like collage of found media, and I believe this is more of an authored creation when compared to Richard Prince's using someone else's Instagram selfie and repurposing that as his art by adding a comment to it and screen-grabbing it. What is and isn't art is sometimes to me, clearer than copyright ownership and sometimes vice-versa.
