Your understanding is incorrect. The case was about whether an LLM can be an author, and did not whether the person using it can be (which will be the case). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260110
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/
Quoting from that post:
> At the core of the dispute is a bedrock of copyright law: that copyright is for humans, and humans alone. In legal/technical terms, "copyright inheres at the moment of fixation of a work of human creativity."
Similarly, the operator of the LLM is the holder of the copyright of the LLM’s output.
This is incorrect. The monkey is unable to have a copyright on the photograph, but there was no court case suggesting the owner of the camera (Slater) has a copyright on the photo, and the Copyright Office's rules actually say the opposite, that it isn't copyrightable at all (the Wikipedia summary of the situation is good, pointing out the Copyright Office specifically added an example of "a photograph taken by a monkey" to their guidance to make their point clear).
The professional photographer claimed he engineered the situation that led to the photo and thus he owns the copyright on the images. That specific claim appears to not have been addressed by the court nor by the copyright office. Instead Slater settled by committing to donations from future revenue of the photos.
The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.
Using AI as a tool to produce output, no matter how complex the underlying tool, should result in the authorship of the output being assigned to the user of the tool.
If autocorrect in Word doesn't nullify copyright, neither should the use of LLMs; manifesting an idea into code and text and images using prompts might have little human input, but the input is still there. And if it's a serious project, into which many hours of revision, back and forth, testing, changing, etc, there should be absolutely no bar to copyright.
I can entertain a dismissal based on specific low effort uses of a tool - something like "generate a 13 chapter novel 240 pages long" and seeing what you get, then attempting to publish the book. But almost anything that involves any additional effort, even specifying the type of novel, or doing multiple drafts, or generating one chapter at a time, would be sufficient human involvement to justify copyright, in my eyes.
There's no good reason to gatekeep copyright like that. It doesn't benefit society, or individuals, it can only benefit those with vast IP hoards and giant corporations, and it's probably fair to say we've all had about enough of that.
How long they will agree this in the face of large media companies' lobbying efforts remains to be seen.