Parts of Debian dismiss AI-contributions policy

Machinally manipulating a work does not generate a new work, so it’s just a machinal transformation of the original work and therefore bound to the same terms, which the *user* of the machine must honour.

Your "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It is entirely possible for a machine transform of a work to remove all copyright-relevant aspects of the original, leaving something that's no longer protected by copyright. As your terms are about lifting restrictions that copyright protection places on the work by default, if the transform removes all the elements that are protected by copyright, there's no requirement for the user to honour those terms.

For example, I can write a sed script that extracts 5 lines from the Linux kernel; if I extract the right 5 lines, then I've extracted something not protected by copyright, and the kernel's licence terms do not apply (since they merely lift copyright restrictions). On the other hand, if I extract a different set of 5 lines, I extract something to which copyright protections apply, and now the kernel's licence terms apply.

The challenge for AI boosters is that their business models depend critically on all of the AI's output being non-infringing; if you have to do copyright infringement tests on AI output, then most of the business models around generative AI fall apart, since who'd pay for something that puts you at high risk of a lawsuit?

And the challenge for AI critics is to limit ourselves to arguments that make legal sense, as opposed to arguing the way the SCO Group did when it claimed that all of Linux was derived from the UNIX copyrights it owned.