AI generated fill images and copyright concers

"You have no copyright on the ai-generated content itself. Nor does anyone else - for copyright to apply, it has to be created by an actual human."

While this is partly true, it's important to remember that the U.S. Copyright Office has officially stated that you can copyright the AI part of an artwork as long as there was "significant" human input during the creation of the AI part...the problem is, they're still hashing out what "significant" means, in this case.

"Actually, it seems pretty similar to sampling in music. You can do it, but you can't go overboard."

And this is 100% incorrect. You can't just sample something in music as long as you don't "go overboard". Even a 1 second sample needs to be cleared if the music isn't in the public domain (or unless it falls under "fair use", which is a very limited and strict area of use).

The reality is that some AI art can be copyrighted and some can't, currently, and unfortunately the powers that regulate this sort of thing are taking a long time to present clear rules and guidelines. That's probably a good thing, but I know it can be frustrating for those of us already deep into AI creation, and wanting to make use of our work. Half the problem, I think, is that most of the people making the decisions about this industry don't have any real, in-depth experience in the actual creation of AI art, so they need to rely on outside expert opinion, which slows the process down.