In the lawsuit, Jason M. Allen asks a Colorado federal court to reverse the Copyright Office’s decision on his artwork Theatre D’opera Spatialbecause it was an expression of his creativity.
Reuters says the Copyright Office refused to comment on the case while Allen in a statement complains that the office’s decision “put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work.”
In your edited photos, a judge can point to any part of the photo and ask, "In this particular part of the photo, why is there this particular hue?" And you can answer, "Because I desaturated it or I adjusted the tone curve or I snapped the photo when I saw that hue in the viewfinder". There is no possibility that 100% desaturation can result in any color other than grayscale. There is no possibility that a desaturation slider will sharpen the image instead of desaturating it. You know what will happen every time you make an edit. That's creative control.
In an AI generated photo, at some point the prompter will answer "Because that's what the AI produced after my prompt, and I accepted the result". In other words, in some parts of the image the prompter could not predict what the result of a prompt would be, but they approved of the result after the fact. It's entirely possible that a prompter could get unexpected results from their prompt. That's direction, not creative control.