You might be able to copy one stroke of a pen exactly, but the thousands or tens of thousands of strokes it takes to paint a painting? Like, yeah, you can copy a painting “close enough”, but it’s not exactly the same, because paint isn’t deterministic.

As far as making a “close enough” copy that isn’t exactly the same with AI, you can just use any image as the input image and set the denoising strength to like .1. Then you’ll get basically the same image but it’ll have a different checksum. So if you wanna steal art, AI makes it way easier.

There’s not really any human creativity in this process, or even using your own prompts, which is the whole point behind the copyright office denying this guy’s copyright claim. Maybe you could copyright your prompt, if it’s detailed enough.