“Elites are bad. And here is a spherical cow to prove it.”

Would licensed lawyers' monopoly on the right to give legal advice in the US survive a First Amendment challenge if it ever reached the Supreme Court?

I believe that it already has reviewed this question and to be clear, it's not the right to give legal advice, anyone can do that, it's the right to represent others in legal proceedings and before government agencies and to charge fees for the provision of such services.

People market themselves when they put on makeup. Should makeup be banned too?

Article clearly says "advertising".

A sad day for the country that holds free speech in high regard

I think this is most significantly a policy issue. Under the existing US law, minor human input could be enough to make AI copyrightable through the "modicum of creativity" argument. However, if this allows for massive amounts of content to be generated (semi-)automatically in much shorter amount of time and with much less effort than what was possible before, it seems strict and generous copyright protections granted to creators of such works by society through the current law are no longer really warranted. In the end, copyright exists to provide motivating reward for creative effort - if such reward is no longer really necessary to enable close-to-infinite creative image generation, the law really may need to be altered to prevent copyright trolls and other nastiness of that nature.

If I spend little more than a second framing a picture with my camera, which is less than the time and effort that it would take me to type in a prompt for an AI, does that mean I haven't put in enough effort to have a copyright for my photo?

It feels like we need some distinction that's a little more qualitative than quantitative.