Comment by jhbadger

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.