It's an interesting question, because AI breaks the intuitiveness of this dramatically.

You can look at say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_at_Cana and quickly get that yup, this took a whole lot of time and effort.

But AI has nothing like that. Some things that look like an awful lot of work it spits out with ease, some things that sound simple can take a whole lot of fiddling.

Like the other day I was playing with DALLE3, and for whatever reason it didn't want to place things on a table.

In the same way that using a limited medium like some oil paints, paintbrushes, and canvas to create images = the art of painting, there will become the art of hacking / abusing / advanced prompt engineering / pushing AI to do things that are close to or at its limits of capabilities.

A: Oh so your LLM generated an image of a spaceship cockpit, so what?

B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

A: :o amazing!

So AI artists do not necessarily equal 'creatives who render images using AI tooling', they may instead be 'creatives who tease out novel outputs from AIs' or something like that.

Then again, this is suspiciously close to a 'what is art' conversation, so i'll stop here.

> B: So what? This LLM was trained on nothing but tax records from 1929!

I recon a sufficiently advanced AI could learn enough to do that from only that training data and some appropriate prompting.

Right now, I'd guess engineering and growing custom life forms, like The Thought Emporium is doing. Not sure how long that will last for.