Copyright

A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. My first reaction was "Good!"

On reflection, there are some complexities here. If you are trying to do your own book covers, you might find these web posts useful. Cover art and More midjourney

Are you back from the rabbit hole yet? Two things stood out:

• It generally takes some skill and practice to make the AI do something actually useful. That is human ingenuity at work. The AI itself doesn't actually do work in any deep sense: the programmers and the program's users do. Who gets the copyright for this effort? Nobody. (Assuming there is some significant effort. Maybe a generic landscape is all you need.)
• As illustrated in this link, "None of the images are perfect. They need work before being used." The initial image is not copyrightable, per the copyright office and now the judge, but when you maniplate it with GIMP in some non-trivial ways to make it suit your purpose, you possibly do have something copyrightable. But how much effort is required to make it yours, and how do you then distinguish yours from someone else's who used the same base image?

I think there are still some worms left in the can.