AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US Federal Judge

Eh I think it would have been worse if this guy won. To my knowledge he was trying to get the AI to be considered the author and then himself to be the owner of the copyright via the "work for hire" clause. As I understand it that would have been catastrophic. It would have likely meant that anything users prompt from these generators would automatically be the copyright of the people running the AI.

The process you describe could likely still be protected under this ruling since there's human involvement in the selection of output to use and the altering of it afterward to fit whatever creative vision the person had. If this had won a person doing that it seems would at best be making a derivative work and still not be able to protect it.

Here's the relevant part from a different article:

Thaler, who listed himself as the owner of the copyright under the work-for-hire doctrine, sued in a lawsuit contesting the denial and the office’s human authorship requirement. He argued that AI should be acknowledged “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria,” with any ownership vesting in the machine’s owner. His complaint argued that the office’s refusal was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with the law” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of agency actions. The question presented in the suit was whether a work generated solely by a computer falls under the protection of copyright law.

Copyright laws have a standards for minimal creativity needed to create a copyrightable work. You don't have to be very creative to qualify, but you need a minimal amount. There's no good reason to think the US copyright office will not apply these same standards to AI art prompts.

The US copyright office specifically lists "listings of ingredients or contents" as not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. This is why there is no legal recourse within copyright to prevent someone from copying the ingredients and quantities of your cooking recipe. If the prompt you give your AI is more than a list, you will not have a copyrightable work. For example, if you open up an AI image generator and type: "paved road on a cliff-face overlooking a pine forest," the resultant output would likely be ineligible for copyright because the prompt was little more than a list of the image's contents.

If your use of AI is creative enough to reach the level of "minimally creative" in the eyes of the US copyright office, the work is copyrightable.

When taking a photograph, you chose the settings, you chose the framing, you chose the equipment. That is enough to be eligible for copyright, unless the shot was taken by a macaque or a grizzly bear.