That may sound convincing to somebody unfamiliar with the software, but how the process is characterized is misleading.

Certainly, the less information given to the AI, the more random the output. However if you sculpt your prompt to include all of the photographic and desired image factors, you can produce a very specific result. The AI model can simulate all of the photography factors, listed, if you instruct it to do so. Lens type, exposure time, lighting, film stock etc.

A person could take an actual photo. Then recreate that image from scratch through the AI by providing enough information to sculpt the output with all the factors involved in the photo's composition.

That would leave you with two nearly identical images created by the same person, but only one of those images able to be protected by copyright law. But both images required the same compositional choices on behalf of the image creator.

I recommend every play with software like midjourney or stable diffusion themselves and learn the basics about how AI prompting is done, and learn how specificity on the part of the artist/software user is always going to be necessary to produce the desired result.

Certainly with the comic book artist in the article, it should become obvious that the images in question aren't completely at random, but all done in a similar style that served to illustrate the story and in a specific order that matches and illustrates the written text. That can't occur at random, it required very specific decisions made by the artist for each image.