> That comic required significant work on the user's part to edit the images and re-synthesize portions of each frame repeatedly while doing things like inpainting, outpainting, re-prompting, etc. And likely required use of some other tools like Photoshop or Indesign (midjourney absolutely did not generate the bubbles or comic book text).

The issue is that the AI's output is deterministic, and the prompts it uses are commonly too short to be eligible for copyright, not least because someone else could plausibly use the same prompt independently. With the same seed, the AI would then produce the same image. Or produce a similar image in response to a similar prompt.

If you could copyright that, you then have an enforcement problem, because the usual way to show copying is similarity, but you can then have two images that are similar yet independent. And some light Photoshop work is not going to eliminate the similarity.