@admin

It was a hypothetical, I was just using myself as an example. Here's one that's not hypothetical:

I'm already a practiced in 3D modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, lightning, rendering, compositing, etc. I could recreate a painting, pixel for pixel, in 3D space.

If I just hit render, is that my art now? It took a lot of research to learn how to do this, I should be able to make money on that effort, right?

I can do that millions of times and get the same result. I can set it on a loop and get as many as I want. It's the same as copying the first render's file, it just takes longer.

Now I decide to change the camera angle. Almost the entire image is technically different now, but the composition is the same. The colors, the subjects, relative placement in the scene, all the same, but it's not really the same image anymore. Is it mine yet?

I can set the camera to a random X,Y,Z position, and have it point at a random object in the scene (so it never points off into blank space). Are those images mine? It's never the same twice, but it still has the original artist's style of subjects and lighting. I can even randomize each subjects position, size, hue, direction, add a modifier that distorts them to be wobbly or cubic... I can start generating random objects and throwing them in too, let's call those "hallucinations", thats a fun word...

At what specific point in this madness does the imagery go from someone else's work to mine?

I absolutely can generate millions of unique images all day. Without using machine learning, based on work I recreated with my own human hands, and code I write uniquely from my experience and abilities. None of the work - artistically - is mine. I made no decisions on composition, style, meaning, mood, color theory, etc.

You may want to try to write these questions off, but I can tell you with certainty that other artists won't.