The thing you're authoring is just your prompt. Apply for a copyright for it. The image or text generated in reply is generated by a computer with no more input from you than someone commissioning work using very precise words, and lacks human authorship.
This falls apart when you start getting into things like control net and posing, or iterative erasing, reprompting, and in/outfilling. It starts feeling more like some weird combination of 3d modeling, photoshop, and a really advanced autofill.
if you keep prompting an artist for edits over and over again for more changes, you don't suddenly own the copyright.
the lesson you should learn is that advanced ai autofill in photoshop may lack human authorship, but it wasn't good enough to become a serious copyright issue until those tools came into existence.
It's not the same. If you make exactly the same mouse movements in paint 100 times, you will get 100 identical images. If you enter the exact same midjourney prompt 100 times, you'll probably get 100 different resulting images. The relationship between your authorship and the final image in the two cases is quite different.
your mouse doesnt make decisions for you. ML based art does, which is why it lacks human authorship and you shouldn't be able to copyright it.
If you hand painted something in photoshop 100% you can copyright it. It has human authorship. If its mostly AI based fill, those elements can't be copyrighted. if Its 100% an ai result, its public domain.
