Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation... but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to speak.

I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing everyone that produces something substantially similar.

Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.