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I suspect with a creative enough prompt you will likely be able to claim copyright and author ship over the works.

It seems that's not the case, no matter how much effort or time you expend on the prompts. This is from the Copyright Office:

The Office does not question Ms. Kashtanova’s contention that she expended significant time and effort working with Midjourney. But that effort does not make her the “author” of Midjourney images under copyright law. Courts have rejected the argument that “sweat of the brow” can be a basis for copyright protection in otherwise unprotectable material.18 The Office “will not consider the amount of time, effort, or expense required to create the work” because they “have no bearing on whether a work possesses the minimum creative spark required by the Copyright Act and the Constitution.”

Here's another key factor:

Because of the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces, Midjourney users lack sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the “master mind” behind them. The fact that Midjourney’s specific output cannot be predicted by users makes Midjourney different for copyright purposes than other tools used by artists.

This only applies to an image generated with AI prompts that isn't significantly altered by an artist.

Here's the Copyright Office's response for anyone interested.

Autonomously AI generated art cannot be copyrighted.

Remember, AI generated work is in the public domain.

That hasn't been determined yet. A human prompt used by the AI to generate content might be enough to grant copyright. This case is about autonomous AI generated content.

If you generate something with AI and claim you created it yourself you can easily be asked to reproduce a similar works again.

Asked by whom exactly? The Copyright Office? Are they going to ask for prove from every artist that requests registration for a work?

If you say you did use AI you should be able to show how much effort you are putting into creating the images

Or you can lie in your request. From the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices:

"As a general rule, the U.S. Copyright Office accepts the facts stated in the registration materials, unless they are contradicted by information provided elsewhere in the registration materials or in the Office’s records."

In practical terms? If you are going to generate content using AI either don't say it was AI generated or lie about how much human involvement it had. Also you can't use "this work was completely made by AI" as a hook.

That latter case likely wont be copyrightable

It is if you don't say it's AI generated or you lie about how much human input it required which would be impossible to prove false.

they generate from stealing the work of thousands of human artists.

Has this been litigated yet?

Only if you say it was written by an AI, that's the lesson here.

because since some diffusion generation are deterministic

You are generalizing and using the word "some" at the same time.

Linux Hater's Blog was half satire and half honest criticism.

This reminds me of the old linux hater's blog post "At least we don't have any viruses".