It's not a question of whether the AI can be creative in a philosophical sense, current copyright law (in the US) only protects human creativity -- AI and non-h

It's not a question of whether the AI can be creative in a philosophical sense, current copyright law (in the US) only protects human creativity -- AI and non-human animals can't hold IP at all, nor can they delegate it to someone else. Under current copyright law, if you built a model that surpassed humans and trained itself on simulations and it wasn't making derivative works but instead producing purely original output, the resulting output would not be copyrightable. In fact, under current copyright law, if you built an AI that was sapient, the creative work it made would not be copyrightable -- unless you literally got the law to grant it legal personhood or something. Moving AI in a direction of being more fundamentally creative makes this harder, not easier. The legal defense of copyright in cases involving AI is that the creativity is coming from the human using the AI, not the AI itself. As the AI gets better at generating usable output with less directing and micromanaging, that argument gets weaker, not stronger. The question isn't whether or not the AI is creative or produces novel output, the question is whether a human exhibited enough creativity making the work for it to meet the standard of gaining copyright protections -- which, traditionally, the US copyright office has usually held isn't true for AI-generated content.