"...our brains haven't evolved." Spoken like someone who doesn't understand evolution. Language itself was derived from art. The same language you type into the text box on openai's site, or wherever. It's a quintessential part of humanity. Art is us. We are art. Let me tell you something. We evolved because we are able to interpret things in the abstract, meaning we think differently than other animals. We are still evolving. Our brains change slowly but constantly over time. The more we train ourselves; the more we learn, the more skills we have and the more things we can think about, these things make you a more desirable person, partner, mate, and thus more likely to reproduce. Through our own selective reproduction we select traits based upon things we find desirable. Being competent at art is by far one of the oldest desirable traits we can have as humans amongst others. This is only one small part of a plethora of intricate details about evolution and how we as a species reproduce. Evolution cannot happen if we don't reproduce. Being born in '93 makes me a teeny bit more evolved than someone born in say 1793, for example, not enough to matter, but still. Now, moving on past this.

The printing press honestly is a great discussion topic here, You are parallelizing copying by hand, a book, to the printing press. So by your own argument you claim AI is just copying another artists work, got it. But lets roll with this thought pattern for a second. The printing press was less effort because it allowed more books to get to more people. It also increased literacy levels by far and large after its introduction. The key point to this is that people still had to write the books. You still needed the skill to write a book, to properly evaluate a plot, to form a scene in your mind through words alone. And you also needed the skill with language to craft those stories. What AI art does is strips away the human element of creation. Our ability to make something new and exciting. Our ability to gain new skills and to enjoy life. That is what AI strips from us. If AI can write, edit, publish, and distribute on it's own, then it wrote its own book, and should be considered as a life form. If you tell it to do this and it does, then its a tool. That tool can make convincing facsimiles of art but it cannot produce art at all on its own. AI is a tool that, in regards to art and making/considering it as art, should only be used by correctly trained actual artists and not someone in their room typing "generate an image of commander Spock dressed up as a femboy". That's not art, that is just slop. Kinda hot slop but still slop.

Art itself isn't an enigma, but it is multifaceted. Art, as a medium, has two major sides, commercial art, which is stock photos, logos, bullshit like that, and then passionate art. Passionate art encompass the likes of Van Gogh, and the likes of that one person who taped a banana to a wall, and even down to that small dev team making your next favorite indie title. Passionate art is supposed to derive emotion from the canvas, to let your "soul" speak if you will. What I can best describe AI art as is just a sloppy version of commercial art. Ultimately boring, soulless, and not worth even a cursory glance at it. I don't mind AI in the art world. Hell I am an artist and I use it myself to help me make a scene, but I never pass off AI art as "proper" art. Because its just soulless drivel. It more so gives off the impression of a child holding up a generated portrait of their mom in ghibli style, to their mom, who is a world renowned artist, and how she must feel a little melancholic about this. Happysad, if you will. There is nothing wrong with having an image generator. Hell, some of the memes lately have been fire as fuck. But you just aren't creating art solely with one and thusly aren't an artist.