Your comparison of taking inspiration and literally generating something from someone elses image is the most braindead take on ai I’ve read. As a human you can’t replicate someone’s style to the extent that ai does. And if you are drawing from reference and trying to make something as close to the original as possible then it’s normal to give credit (with digital art at least).
If you consider the prompter to be the artist then do you consider me to be an artist when I make a Google search and click on images? I still get an image I didn’t make but I wouldn’t say that makes me an artist.
And according to your quote the ai model couldn’t be an artist simply because it can’t consider anything to be an art, it just gives you the random noise that is the result of putting some text through its network. There are of course other reasons why the model shouldn’t be considered an artist but this was the simplest I think.
Anyway, I’d say that ai art shouldn’t be called art when there’s no artist.
First of all, you can’t make a perfect copy. Second of all, faking paintings and advertising them as original just so happens to be illegal. Can you give me a reason why it should be acceptable when AI does it?