Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
In the case of a camera, you know how the pohotgraph will turn out. You set and positioned the camera in a specific, creative way to ensure that composition.
In the case of an AI, it's not the paintbrush, it's the painter. The prompts serve less as arms to a brush and more as instructions to a commissioned artist.
So if I stick out the camera from a corner then I don't own the copyright because I don't know how the photograph will turn out, if that's not case then I should own the copyright of an AI generated image because in both cases I have an approximate understanding of what the image would be.
This is very much like the "is electronic music real music?" debates when people can quickly throw together some presets and hit play.
TLDR it's untested in United States court, but yes, the same principles apply. You very well might not own the copyright on that street-corner photo.
There is no way of getting around the human authorship and creativity requirement. There's no loophole that AI can sneak though. If AI output does become copyrightable, it will only be because of arguments that the controlling of that AI is sufficiently creative and deliberate to pass the minimum threshold required by law and the outcome isn't a random or uncontrolled result. Saying that it's "just like pressing buttons on a camera" does you no favors, if photography was just pressing a button then it wouldn't be copyrightable.
And in fact, there was an 1884 Supreme Court challenge over photography copyright that was predicated exactly on the argument that photography was a purely mechanical reconstruction of an existing scene (https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2020/09/historic-court-cases...). The argument was rejected not because purely mechanical reconstructions are copyrightable, but because the court disagreed and said that photography was both an act of human creativity and that it had a controlled outcome, similar to "writing" or "engraving".
And note that a critical component of "writing" or "engraving" is intent and control. When you write down something on a page, you get the result that you intended to put on the page; you control the "words" that appear. An important question when discussing AI copyright is what the threshold is where we can say that use is actually controlling the AI. A vague prompt might not qualify, an extremely specific prompt that is itself a creative expression might? A more guided process might? (although it's not certain if this would cover the resulting image or just the prompt itself). This is all untested in current law.
Right now there's thing like ControlNet which allows you to draw a skeleton for the AI to follow. There are plugins that provide masking. You can draw stuff on top of an existing image. You can draw a sketch for the AI to follow. You can fix details in post.
So there's a multitude of possibilities available.
The interesting thing is that unless you are involved in the scene it's very hard to tell what took the user a lot of work, guidance and retouching to generate, and what popped out just like that.
Example:
This case was analogous to claiming the camera as the author, and the photographer as a copyright owner only because the camera did the work as a work for hire.
Which would also fail.
Take any good digital came, switch it on, and press the button. Do you get a great photograph? No, because you haven't even removed the lens cap. Photography is not about pressing the button, it's about where you point the camera and how you configure it before you push the button.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co...
I could see an argument that a heavily augmented normal photo is not much different from a photo generated from a prompt. Digital zoom is virtually AI inpainting where it guesses the detail.