No, the output of an AI is fundamentally “coincidental” and should not be subject to copyright.

If the image generator in question generated a piece of content that looks similar enough to some piece of content protected by copyright, odds are that it has been trained with it, or that both were produced with the same set of pieces of content.

That shows that the issue might be elsewhere - it isn’t the output of the image generators, but the works being fed into the generator, when “training” them. (IMO the word “training” is rather misleading here.)

Human intent and authorship MUST be a significant factor.

Refer to the link in the OP, regarding photography. All this discussion about “intent” (whatever this means) and authorship has been already addressed by legal systems, a long time ago.

their direct involvement and manipulation must be meaningfully “transformative” for copyright to apply in a fair and equitable way.

What does “meaningfully” mean in this context? It’s common for people using Stable Diffusion and similar models to create a bunch of images and trash most of them away; or to pick the output and “fix” it by hand. I’d argue that both are already meaningful enough.

If anything, this only highlights how the copyright laws were already broken, even before image gen…