Very eloquently put. I often find it interesting how when these types of issues come up, technologists often interpret it using "transitive rules" that are nat

Very eloquently put. I often find it interesting how when these types of issues come up, technologists often interpret it using "transitive rules" that are natural in math and engineering, but "the real world" doesn't follow this logical progression. That is, if you have "A implies B, and B implies C, and C implies D, then A implies D". The problem is that in "the real world" there are enough slight differences at each step that most people feel that A does not imply D. Point being, there are lots of comments here along the lines of "If creating art with a tool can be copyrighted, how is art created with Photoshop copyrightable but art created with AI is not". The difference is that most people (and, most importantly, the US Copyright Office) believe that AI crosses the line between being "just a tool" to actually being the author of significant parts of the work. The fact that that line is gray is not a fundamental problem, and as you point out it occurs all the time in the legal realm.