Thanks for this, I really liked this comment. Good read.
I think about this a lot as well. Especially because of what I know about how AI works. It makes the term "AI art" confusing to me. Which part is the art? Is it the final result? Is it the prompt technique? I don't know for sure. But what I suspect, is that the final result is not the art of it--and this is why:
AI works by building and understanding a concept. A cigar is never just a cigar to an AI. So if I type "a girl standing in a field" and it produces a decent image, whoopdie doo. But what if I accept AI for what it is, keep in mind what it does, and then I say something like "wet metal raindrop ripple blooming breath" and it produces a wildly detailed image, 2D but obviously sourced from some 3D environment subject to it's own physics, an image of a lone vine growing from rich dirt with a single droplet of dew on it's leaf (notice no signs of metal)... what if I did that on purpose? Is it art yet?
Then, what if my next generation is blank and it still gives me something with thematic connection? It has no data. Why did it produce another flower? Or another something earthy? You look and find that there's no data saved between generations but this happens so often that it's an undeniable pattern... why? how? I think somewhere deeper down this rabbit hole, there's something artsy.