It is a bit more complicated than that, and the legal motivation from the Copyright Office is different than what you describe.

One of the most informative cases, in my opinion, is the Copyright Office’s back and forth on Zarya of the Dawn. In their view, even thousands of refining prompts cannot be sufficient to convey copyright protection on an AI generated image since it lacks the necessary control and connection to the person. Suryast is another helpful case. I think they’re still very incomplete when you start to consider works like those from Jackson Pollock or, my personal favorite hypo, an artist with a prosthetic that uses statistical machine learning to control the end effector and thus the paintbrush. But those are just hypotheticals for now.

I help chair a conference of IP attorneys and others who specialize in software licensing and AI so we’ve been talking about this for a while now. We actually just had the conference this week so I can probably share some resources or presentations if people really want to get nerdy about it.

I wouldn’t say it is too far out of date, having just gone through all of it in the past few months. That said, Bazzell does provide a lot of smaller updates in his Unredacted magazine articles. I believe he said he is no longer planning to update the book because he couldn’t afford to take the time since the book was being torrented a bit too much (I might be misrembering). Either way, his magazine is really good too. I became a big fan of his after that first book.

For anyone unfamiliar, I strongly recommend Michael Bazzell’s book Extreme Privacy for a fantastic entry into this world. It covers much more than your typical OPSEC stuff, but it is thorough, well written, and fun to learn about.