It doesn't seem that obvious to me. Cameras and computer software really blur the line. A photo is a "mechanically produced work," and yet we still afford them

It doesn't seem that obvious to me. Cameras and computer software really blur the line. A photo is a "mechanically produced work," and yet we still afford them copyright. If I put a camera in the middle of a busy shopping mall, set to capture images every 10 seconds, and them come back later and choose the top 5 images, I'm reasonably sure those would be granted copyright protection (If you disagree, replace that example with a timelapse of the sky). I've played around with landscape photography, and I can confidently say that I've gotten some stunning photographs that were mainly luck and being in the right place at the right time. Conversely, I've spent multiple hours trying to wrangle Stable Diffusion into giving me the image I want through different prompts, generating VAEs / Hypernets, ControlNet, img2img, etc. If we were judging "creative effort", I'd argue the latter required significantly more on my part. Likewise, if I take Blender 3D, and start creating a cityscape I'm pretty sure that would be considered for copyright. But what if part of that process is creating a python script that randomly selects a building object to place in a city block grid? Is that algorithmic work grounds for losing copyright? What if instead of a random choice, it does it according to some process of my design (1 story buildings can't go next to skyscrapers, etc)? What if it's a ML algo that takes feedback from me based on which ones I accept / reject? What if it cycles through a set for each position, and lets me press Y/N for the choice? What setting up a bonsai in front of a white sheet and taking a photograph of it. Obviously, copyrightable. What about writing an algorithm that generates bonsai tree objects, and making a rendering of it? What about 3D printing it out, and then placing in where the real bonsai was, and taking a picture? I feel like I should have less claim to a copyright in the case of the bonsai photo (which I had zero input in growing or making) versus the 3D version (in which I created an algorithm to generate bonsai-like objects, which means it is "algorithmically created" and not worthy of a copyright). It seems from my perspective that these works should be afforded copyright. There was at least a modicum of creative effort that went into the prompt selection, generation, and image choice. Enough that it meets the minimum effort that taking a random snapshot of a city street would require, for instance, and especially if effort was taken in generating the Hypernet / embedding, posing through ControlNet, etc. And more importantly, enough that the author decided it was interesting enough to keep and publish (and that a potential third-party also considers valuable enough to yoink a copy of). You've "created" / "discovered" / "put to paper" something that did not exist before, and which clearly has value. I guess I'm having trouble understanding what the downsides of allowing these to be copyrighted are.