I suspect with a creative enough prompt you will likely be able to claim copyright and author ship over the works.
It seems that’s not the case, no matter how much effort or time you expend on the prompts. This is from the Copyright Office:
The Office does not question Ms. Kashtanova’s contention that she expended significant time and effort working with Midjourney. But that effort does not make her the “author” of Midjourney images under copyright law. Courts have rejected the argument that “sweat of the
brow” can be a basis for copyright protection in otherwise unprotectable material.18 The Office “will not consider the amount of time, effort, or expense required to create the work” because they “have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution.”
Here’s another key factor:
Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the “master mind” behind them.
The fact that Midjourney’s specific output cannot be predicted by users makes Midjourney different for copyright purposes than other tools used by artists.
This only applies to an image generated with AI prompts that isn’t significantly altered by an artist.
This is a lot more relevant to most people’s workflows, but even it reads like it wouldn’t apply to someone using processes that allow them more control, e.g., a Stable Diffusion workflow using multiple iterations; ControlNet with author-created posing; in-painting with directed img2img prompts for additional control; additional directives that restrict the creative output in a particular domain, e.g., the palette or lighting type, to an author-provided set; and most of all, AI-free post-processing.
It seems that’s not the case, no matter how much effort or time you expend on the prompts. This is from the Copyright Office:
Here’s another key factor:
This only applies to an image generated with AI prompts that isn’t significantly altered by an artist.
This is a lot more relevant to most people’s workflows, but even it reads like it wouldn’t apply to someone using processes that allow them more control, e.g., a Stable Diffusion workflow using multiple iterations; ControlNet with author-created posing; in-painting with directed img2img prompts for additional control; additional directives that restrict the creative output in a particular domain, e.g., the palette or lighting type, to an author-provided set; and most of all, AI-free post-processing.
That is a far more interesting read and more damning than what all these article are talking about - the Thaler v. Perlmutter case.