These are my thoughts as well. It seems obvious that putting in ‘cat with a silly hat’ as a prompt is basically the creative equivalent of googling for a picture.

But, as you say, that sort of AI usage is just dumb, bottom tier usage. There’s going to someday be a major, critical piece of art that heavily uses AI assistance in it’s creation and people are going to be surprised that it’s somehow not copyrightable under the laws and rulings they’re working on now.

I remember in the LOTR behind the scenes they talked about how WETA built a game l like software to simulate the massive battle scenes, giving each soldier a series of attacks and hp, etc. They then used this to build out the final CGI.

Stuff like that has already been going on for ages and it’s only going to get more murky as to what ‘AI art’ even means and what is enough human creativity and editing added to the process to make it human created rather than AI created.