The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
I see this comparison to a camera a lot but I don't think it works (not that you're saying this, I'm just contributing). I'm not an expert but to me the camera is doing very little of the work involved in taking an artistic picture. The photographer chooses which camera to use to get a certain effect, which lenses, the framing, etc. All the camera is doing recording the output of what the person is specifying.
I think there's a sliding scale in both cases. Vanilla prompting something like DALL-E 3 and uncritically accepting what it spits out is the AI equivalent of dime-a-dozen smartphone snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or an ocean sunset. But like your description of professional photography, there are more intricate AI approaches where an expert user can carefully select a model, a fine-tune/LORA, adjust the temperature or seed, inpaint or layer different elements, and of course have the artistic vision to describe something interesting in the first place.
Photography mostly eliminated the once-indispensable portrait artist, among other formerly-dependable lines of work.
There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.
Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?
> until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.
The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.
And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
The work a camera does is capturing the image in front of the photographer. "Art" in the context of photography is the choice of what in the image should be in focus, the angle of the shot, the lighting. The camera just captures that; it doesn't create anything that isn't already there. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
The work of Krita/Inkscape/etc (and technically even Photoshop) is to convert the artistic strokes into a digital version of how those strokes would appear if painted on a real medium using a real tool. It doesn't create anything that the artist isn't deliberately creating. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
AI Gen, as demonstrated in the linked page and in the tool comparison, is doing all of the work of generating the image. The only work a human does is to select which of the generated images they like the best, which is not a creative act.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.