i never implied the artist would be the person who developed the AI to begin with. the AI itself is the artist, as it is the amalgamation of whatever resources it is trained on, and is essentially commissioned by a person to create works of art for them.

the individual using the AI is no more an artist than a person requesting a more upbeat song from a busker, or a company commissioning an ad agency to develop content for their brand.

when “the tool” is the entire artistic process, and the individual using the tool does virtually nothing artistic at all to prompt the generation of the art, then the tool is the artist. artists inherently need to meet certain criteria by definition in order to be artists in the technical and classical sense, and in most instance in such AI is employed for art, virtually none of those criteria are met by the person using their token to generate a piece.

a hammer and a nail gun still require a skilled hand to be effective. a more fair comparison is the difference between using a hammer or a nail gun, and hiring a skilled laborer to use a hammer or a nail gun.

as per your last paragraph: what if, as is done in countless instances, one were to train the AI on a specific piece or series of pieces by a specific artist, then ask it to recreate scenes in a facsimile of their style. in instances where people do this and claim credit for the art, or worse yet, profit off of the skills the actual artist developed and the AI emulated, that is orders of magnitude less artistically ethical than using actual artistic skill to draw or paint from a reference image, something almost all artists already do and have done since the advent of the art form.