I've recently gotten a lot of attention for my Midjourney stuff, and I did cause it to be, and I do own the copyright, but I don't claim it as "my art." I think we know that's disingenuous because we didn't create the specific composition.
It's like if I asked one of my assistants to paint something based on a paragraph I wrote, is that MY art? Not at all.
The "we didn't create the specific composition" bit is the one that's most contentious, I think. Even in Midjourney, getting an image to be just right takes a lot of time and skill with all the flags, word weights, and specific word prompts you have experiment with over hours. To me, the resulting image feels very much like my composition, with every element of the image placed exactly where I want them on the canvas, with the specific style, color, and feel that I dictate.
Your analogy with an assistant is interesting, but to me is flawed. A better analogy in my view would be an art director or concept artist coming up with a concept that they ask their team to execute. In that case, it's normal for the art director to take credit for the art, and in this context where the AI is just a tool with no agency, I feel the same way.
An example prompt for a recent image I generated: "skull::0.75 of a woman with long hair, ornate::0.9, hooded::0.7 robe::0.7, highly detailed::0.8, decorated, full body, standing in a mystical::0.8 forest::0.7, style of Aleksi Briclot, realistic::-1 photoreal::-0.7, --no water --no sky, --ar 4:5"
Prompt aside, the final image took me about an hour to make, rerolling a number of times to get the composition I want with the base v3 algorithm, then upscaling and then remastering with the --test --creative --upbeta mode, and rerolling again until I got the final remaster just right.
It looks great, and there's definitely an art to prompting. But whether you created the exact composition as we were discussing still isn't solved for me. It's not full body, there's barely something that looks like a skull, and it's off to the side.
It's a very interesting question that I think we'll be debating and thinking about for some time.
It's like if I asked one of my assistants to paint something based on a paragraph I wrote, is that MY art? Not at all.