The thing I’m seeing that does sort of skirt the issue is that it’s very obvious a lot of YouTubers have jumped on AI image generation to produce static images instead of drawing the images themselves or farming it out to an artist on Fiverr or something. So if they want “evil Jerome Powell with flames in his eyes” they hand it to the AI, it spits something out, and into the video it goes, to be published on YouTube as a memey splash image in the video.

Now that it’s in the video, along with all the other clear acts of human creativity that form a video, it’s sort of “washed” in the money laundering sense, and I don’t see how you legally separate that image from the video in a way that makes the image ineligible for copyright. I don’t see a court being flummoxed by that, at all. If you filch the image from the original video, or try to pull excerpts from the video featuring Evil JPow, you’re in violation of copyright, and we’re on pretty solid, well established legal ground with that. At the very least, you are not completely in the clear to just yank that image for yourself.

So while the original raw image of Evil Jpow that the AI spit out was not eligible for copyright by itself, now it is as part of a larger work, open and shut.

Near the end of the article it affirms pretty much that, saying, "An application for a work created with the help of AI can support a copyright claim if a human “selected or arranged” it in a “sufficiently creative way that the resulting work constitutes an original work of authorship,” [as quoted from the copyright office]

My quote is a bit messy there (i’m quoting the article who is quoting the copyright office) but you get the point.

The raw AI output, assuming no human was involved, cannot be copyrighted, but as soon as the AI output is somehow arranged into a larger work by a human, that changes everything.

So yeah, a bit of arranging, some editing, and the completely AI generated footage can be copyrighted all day. At the very least there would be a court case there.