This rings hollow to me for many reasons. When making CGI for movies quite a lot of the process has been completely automated for quite some time. So that scene in the movie is no longer art? Making video games you can use procedural generation to create a landscape, trees, rocks, etc. and most developers do at this point. Do we disregard all that when considering if the game is good or not? Or just blanket "it's bad because of that" like some people are doing with AI created stuff these days?

AI created art and photography keeps winning contests and people get all upset after the fact saying it's not real art. If it's not real art then why are the judges so impressed by it before they hear the word AI? I get the sentimental "but a soul that has experienced pain didn't create it" but if it's fun to look at and gives you joy is that not enough? And there is of course always a person in the loop creating it.

Definition of art: The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.

A director imagines the movie scene and has a rough storyboard sketched, then CGI artists make it who then usually have some form of algorithm or ML help them. I'm sure most people would agree that's art even though the director only had his thoughts interpreted by many different people / machines. Why is that so different than a person asking ChatGPT or Seedance to create something they (and only they) imagined? Is it the effort involved? What if they spent 2 hours refining 1 photo to obsessively to get exactly what was in their imagination onto the screen?