No but they do feel - with measurable physiological correlates and emotional processes we can empathise with. There's nothing comparable in LLMs as they currently exist. No simulation of experience or emotion. There's no argument over whether or not they're communicating a lived experience - since they don't have one. Therefore anything they 'create' is pure stimulation for humans, good or bad entertainment. It cannot be the result of understanding or experience. Art can be entertaining but != entertainment. Pure entertainment has no artistic value, it doesn't attempt to have and shouldn't be evaluated on that criterion at all.

And yet you can look at some AI generated pieces and feel what you would feel if a human being made them, which implies that there is no "simulation of experience or emotion" in art, apart from what the viewer imparts to it. All an artist really brings is technique, which can be replicated.

I would also disagree with you that pure entertainment has no artistic value, simply because I don't think "pure entertainment" entirely divorced from human experience or emotion exists. Even pornography speaks to a fundamental human desire.

Marx would disagree. Alienation from one’s work product is a very real form a suffering.

Sure, but we're talking about artists starving for their art and not artists starving because capitalism. Similar conversations, but not the same.

I think the definition of "art" is rather vague. It encompasses both the creative impulse to produce a work, and the technical skill to bring it into existence. But if one of these components is diminished in a certain work, does it still qualify as art? For example, a commercial artist producing an illustration for a client, using their drawing and painting skills would be considered art - even if it is as technical and linear a process as writing some boilerplate code.

Most artists never make anything worth appreciating.