How about standing in a field, pressing the button on a box with a bit of glass attached to the front?
Lifting one end of a tray in a room with a dim red light, then allow it to drop again?
Dragging colorful squares from one end to another in a computer program like Lightroom?
Of course the act of prompting isn't art. That's not the point. But this confusion is at the core of many of the end-all rejections of the potential use of AI for the production of 'good' art (whatever the heck 'good' means here). It ultimately boils down to some form of "you're doing it wrong." Which seems entirely sensible, until some guy or gal pops up who does it "all wrong" and your jaw drops to the floor.
In some ways it is, in some ways it isn't.
If you're interested, I'd like to invite you to read some primers on how generative Ai works, and in particular the conceptual underpinnings of these models. There seem to be some misconceptions about this in most of your arguments, making them problematic to comment on.
"Good paintings cannot be made with acrylic paints and synthetic brushes. I hate acrylic paints and synthetic brushes unless they're used to paint a door or a wall."
I think much of the problem is that you've not seen or recognized the possibility of an exception to what you perceive as an axiomatic rule. The same happened when photography came around, when CGI first popped up and in plenty of other cases where a new tech emerged, and the first output poured in and it turned out to be lackluster. Da Vinci wasn't the first guy to break a couple of eggs and paint a ceiling with them. Plenty of "meh" ceilings were painted before he performed his miracles.
One of these days, we're going to see art pop up and one day (perhaps soon after, maybe much later) many people will realize it's damn good art - and generative Ai is at the core of producing it. It's a powerful tool and with 8 billion of us running around, there's plenty of talent to exploit it to magnificent ends. The lack of recognition of what capable hands and minds can do with Ai are limited by the same lack of imagination that currently produces the 'slop'. The real challenge at this point of course is to weed out the chaff. But perhaps AI can help in that.
Maybe part of the problem is that AI is so deceptively simple. In that sense, it's a bit like the camera on a modern phone. Point it at something and you walk away with a technically good photo. But how many of those snapshots are 'good art'? A fairly quick session of prompting by a random person can produce technically 'correct' images - but they'll for the most part be 'slop'. Turns out that just like a decent camera doesn't make one an artist, generative AI cannot do the same thing. That, on the other hand, doesn't mean it's inherently impossible.
I feel the core of much of the criticism of many relates to another point you've made, about AI being a potential threat. Many of us are frightened and/or have rapidly grown a dislike for it. It's understandable, and in many cases also justifiable. However, at the risk of gross oversimplification: if something is 90% problematic and 10% promising, you can't just disregard the 10% because of the 90% (or whatever ratio you want to stick to it). Yet, that's what happens. People dislike it, so they disqualify it categorically. It's human nature.
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