An old master? No, it’s an image AI just knocked up and it can’t be copyrighted

> “When I enter prompts into Midjourney, and re-enter them until I get what I want, it’s true I’m not drawing, but I am crafting an image using a tool.”

One problem I have is this: was Midjourney trained from public-domain data, or not? Assuming that most of the authors of the training data never actually agreed to their work being used for this, then I would reword the quote above as:

"it’s true I’m not drawing, but I am crafting an image using a tool that leverages work that I was never allowed to use".

I heavily disagree with the argument that "humans watch paintings and use that knowledge to create new paintings, and it's the same for AI". Because painters know what happens when they "publish" a painting. They implicitly accept that other painters may get inspiration from that, because it has been the case for thousands of years.

But painters can't possibly "implicitly" know the consequences of their work being used as training data. So it would make sense to require their explicit consent before using their work.

In cases like these what it to stop the author (the prompter) from lying and claiming that they in fact created an original work using MS Paint? I don't think it's currently neccessary to show evidence of process (e.g. how you made something) in any copyright claim.

Is all of this AI generation in creative fields simply devaluing digital creation and will it encourage a move back to traditional media? This particular image is in the style of an oil painting, but good luck getting an AI model to generate an _actual_ oil painting.