if a sarcastic, defensive metaphor is what you were looking for, you could've spent a few more minutes coming up with a more logically-sound one. or you could've just engaged with my points directly, without the sarcasm.

if you can ONLY make art with Photoshop and completely lack any ability whatsoever to draw/paint/etc. without it, then yeah, you might not be an artist, but rather, a Photoshop-user.

hopefully we agree at least that LLM users are not artists, right? just because one uses a tool and art comes out the other end does not make one an artist.

An artist starts with PS, they master it can can make beautiful art with it. Then they need to use another product, or work traditionally - there'll be another learning curve but a lot of what they already learned can be reapplied. They're still an artist, even if they exclusively use PS & don't understand the minutiae of traditional art/techniques to smear charcoal until they decide to try it.

A game dev starts with Unity, same thing. They're still a game developer even if they only know how to use Unity - a lot of their knowledge is applicable to game development in general. If they switch to Unreal there'll be a learning curve, but not as steep as when they first started.

The same logic could be applied to cooking: we don't refuse to call someone a chef because they specialise in Asian cuisine, they're still a chef. A physics major is as much a scientist as a chemistry major is.

And as to your last point, it's pretty baity but maybe you have a very narrow definition of art? What is art? Is taping a banana to a wall art? If so then the person who did it is an artist. Personally, though I think you definitely disagree with it, I think using an LLM does make someone an artist as they're using a tool to produce something with aligns with their vision - if they just pressed a button without any input at all, I'm not sure I'd call that art unless it's something performative. But otherwise I put LLM users into the same category as people using PS tools - there's plenty going on under the hood, but the artist is still feeding it with input.

Let's say an artist uses a coloured pencil for some traditional art, are they now not an artist because they don't understand the chemical composition of the pencil that the company worked on so that it leaves a mark just-so? The pencil is a tool that the artist inputs into, but the artist doesn't have to understand the workings of the pencil from an atomic or quantum level to be considered an artist.

I guess I don't understand this strong desire to refer to oneself as a "game developer" completely regardless of one's level of knowledge or experience. I started off making games with RPG Maker 2000 and then later Game Maker when I was in middle school. I was most certainly developing games, but I would not have referred to myself as a "game developer", because I knew that I was using high-level tools to develop games, and I knew that I didn't know the first thing about Actual Game Development, really. later on, in high school, when I tried to use C# and libcairo to make a vector-graphics video game, I was confused as to why the game would run fine at 720p, but chug at 1080p. turns out I didn't know the first thing about what I was doing, and was doing all rendering on the CPU. embarrassing! but definitely the work of someone who was an aspiring game developer, but whom certainly would not consider himself to be a "game developer", unqualified, if asked.

why does the title matter so much to you? and why go to all these lengths to justify not learning the tiniest bit more about the craft of which you claim the title of craftsman, especially when I've gone the lengths I have to lay out exactly how straightforward it would be, and exactly what you have to gain from it?

this insistence over titles and outright refusal to learn basic principles is the sort of thing that makes me think that independent game development has become more of a fashion than a craft taken seriously.