In his correspondence with the US Copyright Office, Jason M. Allen stated that he “input numerous revisions and text prompts at least 624 times to arrive at the initial version of the image” that became “Theatre D’Opera Spatial,” the Midjourney artwork that won the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition. The figure appears in the Copyright Office Review Board’s September 5, 2023 decision refusing to register the work.
The Office cited the number not as evidence of authorship but as part of its reasoning that prompting is an indirect, iterative process: because Midjourney does not treat prompts as direct instructions, a user may need to try hundreds of variations before landing on an acceptable image. The Board treated that as a sign the human was steering, not authoring, the final picture.