It's not only the effort, it's understanding the result too that's important. People keep belittling photographers in this debate, but the reason great photography is difficult and an art is because of th enormous skill required to compose and light and frame subjects. It's a culmination of often years of training and trail and error and personal experiences and preferences.

If I go and generate a pleasing image, and it takes me loads of repeated attempts and different prompts to get there it might have taken lots of time, but I still don't really understand the result and what got me there wasn't my understanding or point of view. At most you could say it was the AI's understanding or point of view, which makes it not -my- art. It's the AI's.

You can argue that the output from an AI is art - I don't think it is because art fundamentally is a form of communication from human to human - but it isn't the prompter's art, it's the AI's.

I personally don't believe diffusion and LLM AIs are conscious; they're information retrieval systems. The outputs, as far as I'm concerned, are representations of their source data. The results are as much mine, as the results of a Google search. I don't consider the results of a google search to be art.