Comment by pas

The machine cannot get authorship, but just as images created by humans with PhotoShop and all kinds of machinery are still copyrighted to the human creator - unless they explicitly set up some circumstances where the process of creation happens completely without them - code/software produced by a machine instructed by a human should get copyright (either original or derivative).

Unless the human is so far removed from the output. (And how far is far enough is probably very much depends on the circumstances and unless/until case law or Congress gives us some unifying criteria, it's going to be up to how the judge and the jury feels.)

..

For example someone set up a system where their dog ends up promoting some AI to make video games. This might be the closest to the case of that photo.

Though there the court ruled only that PETA (as friend of the monkey) cannot sue the photographer, because the monkey cannot be a copyright holder, but very importantly it didn't rule on the authorship of the photographer. (And thus the Wikimedia metadata which states that the image is in thr public domain, is simply their opinion.)