Stable Diffusion and the like are much closer to when photoshop first appeared than they are to than the completely automatic art generation machine people make them out to be.
I remember well both digital cameras and photoshop receiving initial criticism from "real" artists... until they were both widely adopted by these communities.
The critique of digital photography was that it's not really art because you can just take a bajillion pictures and then filter out the ones that don't look good. Photoshop users (especially web comic creators) got similar flack that it didn't take real artistic skill to make nice images in photoshop.
For anyone young enough to always have photoshop and digital photography will likely be surprised that there was such resistance and snobbery around using these tools. There was also the same fear that these tools would ruin art by making "real" artists obsolete.
The test is not "input", but "authorship". If you commissioned some art from an artist, you would have input on what they make but the artist would be the author and copyright holder of their work.
Its hard for me to accept that the prompter "authored" the output of an LLM. The output of the LLM was entirely generated and authored by the LLM. It did so at your command, but that doesn't count as authorship.
This was just a bad decision about copyright, the only reason to support this distinction is to protect art and artists.
Not if the computer program uses GenAI, at least without disclosing and disclaiming from copyright the GenAI contribution, under the current (absolutely ludicrous) Copyright Office interpretation.
> If I as a programmer do creative work (ie programming), it should have the same support.
It does: neither copyright law nor the copyright office defines classes of people (“artists” vs. “computer programmers”) with different effects on if they create artwork with the same type of automated tooling.
The copyright office may make a spurious distinction between GenAI and other tools, but it doesn't distinction between classes of creator the way you seem to think is an issue that needs corrected.
Im not sure about the process for this image and im not sure what I think is fair, but “AI generated” is a wide spectrum.