This is just gatekeeping. Art is not better because it was made by hand as opposed to with technology. If I use a generative model to make art then I’m an artist.
I would argue art is better when it's the result of the effort and vision of an individual
prompting a search engine to stitch images together on your behalf might result in an image you can call art, but imo all the art generated wholecloth like this sucks. necessarily derivative. put into the world without thought.
My favorite critique of LLM work: "why would I bother to read a story that no one bothered to write"
This is just the fallacy of the Protestant work ethic with different words. Things don’t need to be difficult to be good. You can’t tell how hard an artist worked just by looking at the piece. There’s a lot of truly terrible art that has had a ton of work put into it.
It’s very easy to make bad art quickly with powerful tools. It’s also possible to carefully craft prompts which generate amazing results that win awards. Source: I’ve done this. You should see the reactions when people have heaped flowery accords on a drawing and then find out it’s Dall-e. The irony of the transition from “art is rebellion” to pearl-clutching is almost the best part.
That critique says more about your understanding than it does about the work.
If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.