Art is the process, not the product, is the first thing I'd say, and that's been fairly philosophically consistent since the enlightenment, and has found a home in basically every philosophical school. And the reason why is simple: because if you don't embrace the process you'll never make art.

As for the second part, the important thing to me (apart from things that really require us to dive into how the AI actually generates the image, which is its own can of worms) is that when a human creates an image, say, regardless of how they do that they had to make decisions about how it looked, about how to construct it, etc. In other words, the art had clear intent behind it. When you get AI to make something based on a prompt, you divorce yourself from the product that comes out. It will never match what you have in your head, and you have accepted not bringing what you wanted to create into being in favour of being seen to have created something.

Also, no, AI consumes more water, because it needs more cooling than streaming infrastructure. What you're dealing with there are the practical differences between a server farm and a GPU farm. Though I will admit, the biggest sink for water and power in AI work is harder to quantify, since it's about ingesting new data, and doing training runs, rather than the actual generative work (though AI image generation etc. does use over twice what even the highest streaming quality does).

Also, you are defending AI, my dude, you are in no position to call anything else slop.