The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.
but the original laws worked well with cameras didnt it?
The legal idea, that unless a human had creative input, it won't have copyright, doesn't fall afoul of ai generated content. There's nuance of course - what counts as creative input etc.
Of course, a new paradigm is possible with the advent of AI, but it would make copyright _looser_, rather than tighter, imho (and it would be to the progress of the arts and science to do so). But i don't see why it is fundamentally needed.
It feels to me that the copyright office is using this similar line of logic, to make the claim that the resultant work is not copyrightable if it was wholly generated using _only_ a prompt and an AI.