It’s worth reading the full document.
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence
“The Copyright Office issues this statement of policy to clarify its practices for examining and registering works that contain material generated by the use of artificial intelligence technology.”
IANAL, but this seems to be the basic takeaway: if the work is created by AI then it’s viewed as similar to an artist being commissioned to create a piece of artwork, and as an AI is not a human being then the work cannot be copyrighted. Typing a string of text is not deemed to be authorship of a resulting image. That doesn’t mean you can’t create a derivative work based on the AI’s output, so AI would still be a useful tool for getting ideas, I guess.
The “but if you take a photo with a camera” question is answered in the guidance, by the way.
