I loved how in Carnival if you could time it just right you could keep shooting the lowest bear in the bonus level and just keep him going back and forth like 20 times. Also the elusive diamond that would appear in a dropped apple in Mr. Do. I think I only had it happen twice ever in what seemed like thousands of games.

But the treatment of photographs in the decision fits your description. The photographer sets up the environment that allowed the image to exist but it’s the camera that makes the image. The judge held that was protectable because the image represents the human’s mental conception of the scene. It’s not a ridiculous stretch to consider AI to be merely a camera for the prompt-writer’s mental conception. I am certain this argument has been or will be tried in court. The IP owner industry is far from done litigating this topic.