I think so, there's still a lot of creativity that goes into designing the prompts from what I've seen. AI is just another tool for artists to use and I think it could honestly be considered it's own medium, like oil painting or wood burning. But I do also understand the hesitation people feel around AI art and calling it OC.

It's new, but not original. With the recent influx of AI content that doesn't seem to be slowing down, I'd say we should make a new designation of GC - generated content.

AI is trained by analyzing artists' work and then instructed to replicate art in a particular style, therefore, from the beginning of the process it wouldn't be original.

If an AI could create art without being fed galleries of images first and develop its own style that might be considered original.

Depends on how it's synthesized. Some programs, like Midjourney, allow you to use to your own art as material to synthesize new art.

Aside from that, no. It's not OC.

If anything it's credit goes to the AI generator or the company that produced the AI generator, not the person who asked it to create something. Unless they only used it for a backbone and then adjusted and detailed it from there.

If you take the art and just trace and polish it and nobody is any the wiser, in that situation yes. At least until that is found out, in which I will refer to it as derivative work over original content. It's why I am calling some of the digital art I am working on AI derivative rather than full-on original content.

If all you do is generate an image, do no edits whatsoever, and then act like you did it, then I couldn't in good faith considering "OC" since you did nothing but type a few words and maybe click a few buttons or moved a slider 3 pixels to the left.