I hear the distinction you are trying to make. I think it's been argued before but I don't remember where. Something like "if you use our tool you must credit u

I hear the distinction you are trying to make. I think it's been argued before but I don't remember where. Something like "if you use our tool you must credit us - we are part author." That attempt wasn't successful enough to leave much of a mark on me :-) I don't know that the arguments you use are the right ones. Being "under control" has little place in the definition of a tool or medium. Many are valued specifically because they are not under control - with an output too complex to have been under control. Splashing, color mixing, watercolor, impasto, some kinds of paint brushes, lens flare or daylight and weather in photography, rain patterns, all the way to ... "Generative art" which has been around a long time before LLMs and is hard to control, IMO, because the primitives are not humanly intuitive, or add up quickly past what we can intuit. Much of generative art is a matter of trial and error while holding a highly unstable process by the tail. The human artist is responsible for selection and taste but the richness of the output is often entirely the "work" of the process chosen. - Sharing responsibility if you will but the question of who is the author is not really argued anymore. AI generative art seems well in the continuation of that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_art