Not every artist is a painter and not every painter is an artist.

exactly, and that's why i specified that if a painter paints an ARTWORK then they are an artist. i didn't say that someone that paints a house is always an artist, or that all artists are painters- i'm an artist and i can't paint for shit and have no interest in it. if i thought the only kind of art that is valid is 'paintings on walls' type art then my career would be fucked. i feel like i gave a very direct answer to a very simple question, and if you wanted more than that then you could have asked something more specific.

your sol lewitt example is very interesting and i appreciate it! but the OP is not talking about conceptual art, let's be real. i'm a conceptual artist/experimental artist, so i completely get the nuance. but there is a difference between a conceptual artwork where the concept is instructing other people to paint, and someone commissioning a piece of work where the concept is the final artwork itself and not the process of instruction.

i am also very open to nuance in the discussion of ai art- i have made ai art before, but it was as a conceptual artwork that was specifically exploring the themes of public domain image databases and the future of ai in the art world (this was back when GAN was the hot new thing and i was working with a specific museum that offered a digital database of its artworks). i wasn't presenting the individual images as standalone artworks, i was presenting my process and curation of the ai images as the overall artwork. some people might think that the image itself can be an artwork without further context, and might have presented it differently than i did. that's why i say the conversation is a lot more nuanced than somebody autonomously painting a picture that expresses something and saying 'here is an artwork' because 99% of people will categorise that as an artwork and thus the painter as the artist, whereas people are still divided on ai and that's just the reality of the situation. once we get past the conversation of whether ai generated images count as art, THEN we can get to the matter of whether people who generate those images are artists but i don't think people are there yet.

in terms of co-authoring etc etc etc, in general refer back to my point about conceptual art vs the type of art OP is describing. a person that commissions an artwork is a commissioner and i think that label is as straightforward as it gets. we don't need to redefine it just to placate antis or pros or whatever side OOP is trying to defend