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Ah, I see. Well, it's pretty close even if it's not exact. You and another commenter cast enough doubt on it, in any case, that I don't think I can firmly hold a position that it wouldn't be copyrightable.
In practice, courts are going to have a nightmare disentangling what belongs to who. I imagine this is going to be like the issue with transformative/derivative works where there isn't a "bright line" test as to what's a fair use collage and what isn't fair use. 
This video sparked my initial curiosity: someone tuned stable diffusion to be based on public domain images, and is apparently working on one that is trained on only public domain stuff. My initial assumption would be that anything it outputs would likewise be public domain.
However, I think with the evidence you presented, there's enough to say that it's possible for someone to create an original work using midjourney, stable diffusion, or a similar AI.
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I feed an AI my original work and it creates something based on my original work  
I feed an AI a prompt that contains creative expression and it is able to interpret and execute that expression in a way that closely matches my intent  
I feed an AI a detailed series of instructions to draw something to exact specifications and it correctly follows my instructions. The totality of these instructions represent my creative intent. This would be roughly equivalent to doing the same thing through a GUI, but perhaps the instructions are less specific. I think The Next Rembrandt most likely falls under this

Have you used Midjourney a lot or spent a lot of time in discussion spaces around it?
It absolutely does #1. In fact, it's a very popular sort of post to both the discord and the reddit group where someone feeds in their own artwork anything from sketches to photographs. MJ takes image prompts.
Number two seems a little hard to quantify. A broad reading would be matched by any "Fat Darth Vader" image people input and got the thing they were looking for, but I sense you mean something narrower.
Number Three it can do, although it's tricky and takes a lot of work learning the syntax and nuances of MJ as a tool. Yes it's easier to get a slick looking result with relatively simple prompts. As an example, I wanted icons for an info video I was making. I wanted the icons to stand for four concepts I was talking about, I wanted them to be in a simple clear particular style. I experimented and tweaked until I got pretty much exactly the images I was imagining. I might have otherwise made them myself and would have had a pretty similar outcome. I'm a slow draftsman and I thought, correctly that I could do it quicker in MJ. The results are absolutely my specific intent. >

!delta
For number one: I didn't realize you could set it up to train exclusively on your own works or create something from your own works. This would absolutely be something copyrightable.
Number two was partially tongue-in-cheek, I think if an AI is able to recognize those concepts we ought to give it a voter's ID.
Number three could also be my own ignorance at work. If I were to sketch out an idea as a base and then try and craft prompts until I got something that looked like my idea (possibly inked or with colors), then that would definitely fit.
I think this may be a mea culpa, I've only been using the online ones (artbreeder, hotpot, nightcafe, etc.) and I just used midjourney as an example since it's well known