Not a popular opinion around here, but generative AI has little overlap with the processes common to creating all sorts of art, but lots in common with commissioning creative work. When you commission art, you have a discussion with the artist— however long it needs to be to get your point across. That can be quite lengthy and involve many sketches, mood boards, etc for important pieces, or a couple of sentences for others— and there are usually iterations where things get modified based on your input. When I do visual design work, I build those two things into every contract I put together. Using generative AI uses almost exactly the same process as commissioning art — you're just commissioning it from a computer that will give you an amalgam of other people's art much more quickly than humans can produce it. That's fundamentally philosophically different than using a tool that will make it easier to put elements that you made into a piece exactly as you want them. Someone compositing with photoshop or doing layout with indesign or whatnot can't call themselves a paste-up person or a dark room photo editor, but they are still deliberately placing elements they made to look exactly like they want, from their own minds, into a piece that they create. They are creating art. I've seen few people using generative AI in my particular disciplines that even vaguely understand how many decisions that algorithm is making for them in that process. They just don't understand it enough to know what they don't know. That's the point, right? Nothing wrong with that, but it's distinct from creating art. It's not even bumper bowling— it's directing an amalgam of all bowlers and taking credit when it gets a strike.
If you commissioned work from an artist, you wouldn't simply cross out that artist's name and add your own, would you? Art directors and editors who exercise precise control over their artist's output don't remove the artists name and add their own, do they?
If there was an AI system that could competently perform surgery, no matter how much massaging that prompt needed, I wouldn't call myself a surgeon for using it, and it would a fundamentally philosophically different activity than a surgeon performing laproscopic survey, evergreen though they're assisted by a modern tool.