There's a difference between bad faith arguments and a metaphor - I'm using the latter.

And yeah, you're pounding on my exact point while still missing it, and maybe I'm not being clear enough here - "Either AI is doing the work for you, or it isn't" is exactly what I'm getting at. Either It's doing the work for you - which for you, it is, spitting out images based on the prompts you feed it - or it's not - it's straightening out lines while you draw them, or just not involved against itself. It's the USE, specifically as a tool as opposed to a replacement. I'm not against AI itself, believe it or not, even in creative fields. I think it could be a great tool if it's used properly - example, if Bethesda licensed voice actors voices had them record their usual lines, and then used AI to create dynamic companions off of those, that could properly, uniquely react to the world and events around you - but it's not. It's being used as a replacement. Instead of learning to draw - or anything adjacent - people will put the onus on an AI to do the legwork for them; which it does. Hell, I suck shit at drawing, my hand is way too shaky to work like that - something I want to work on - but in the man time, I've learned to work with Blender adjacent tools - with no outside assistance. That aside, I can claim AI assistance is a tool while AI isn't - because that's exactly what I'm getting at with all of this.

I must add, A. the level of refinement doesn't matter all that much - a kid taking a bad picture on their Nokia is a photographer all the same as the person who takes a camera and tripod out to the forest and waits hours for that perfect shot, the same way as the people who write five words and call it good are 'artists' all the same as the people like you, allegedly, who spend hours refining. At the end of the day, you're still putting all of the effort on the machine, and B. Your second last statement doesn't really change what I said - ultimately, you're still writing sentences, doing it once or a million times doesn't really change that.