Well, the courts have already ruled on very similar things, multiple times. If the code is machine created, even if the user is pushing buttons to tell the computer to run, the end work can not be copyrighted.
In 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia became the first court to specifically address the copyrightability of AI-generated outputs. The plaintiff challenged the Office's refusal to register an image that was described in his application as "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine." Affirming the Office's refusal, the court stated that "copyright law protects only works of human creation," and that "human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright." It found that "copyright has never stretched so far [as] . . . to protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absentany guiding human hand." Because, by his own representation, the "plaintiff played no role in using the AI to generate the work," the court held that it did not meet the human authorship requirement. The decision has been appealed.
I have not seen any appeals ruling yet on this. But I also do not expect one as this follows many other such copyright rulings in the past, such as the cases like the "monkey selfie" case, which the Copyright office issued a Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices 12/22/2014 which stated:
"only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention" and that "Because copyright law is limited to 'original intellectual conceptions of the author', the [copyright] office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. The Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants."
Then there is the case of the copyright of comic book "Zarya of the Dawn", authors by artist and AI consultant, Kris Kashtanova, which the images were all created/generated through the use of Midjourney. They Copyright office provided a copyright only on the compendium of the book itself, but all the individual images generated via Midjourney are not copyrightable and are in the public domain to be free for use by anyone, as the simple operation of prompts and instructions to Midjourney was insufficient human authorship to be able to claim a human created the work.
