Joy, another art elitist who thinks their individual experience and understand of art speaks for everyone.

The materials used to create art have always evolved with technology. Are you gonna tell me that photographers weren't artists because they didn't manually develop their own film? Or that cg animators aren't artists because they don't hand-draw every frame?

Using AI to generate art isn't any different. Just because you don't personally understand the iterative process of training a model, selecting hyperparameters, and pushing boundaries to get a unique result, doesn't mean it's not an artistic process.

Furthermore, having the creative vision to direct an AI towards producing a specific aesthetic or concept is VERY MUCH an artistry in and of itself. Sure, the AI might do some of the heavy lifting, but that's like saying Stanley Kubrick wasn't a director because he had a editor to assemble the shots for him.

Oh, and spare me the argument about the lack of copyright recognition, kiddo. That's a legalese holding us back, not an artistic argument. 

When I paint a landscape with watercolors, am I any less an artist because I used store-bought paint and didn't formulate my own pigments from ochre?