Thanks! That's a good point and it made me think for a moment. But here’s why my opinion remains unchanged :)

As long as the human interaction only involves crafting prompts, which is a massive step removed from the actual creation process, the human remains a non-artist.

I mean, search engines like Google also have lots of search operators and ways to be prompted. And there's skill involved in properly prompting Google to dish out some obscure information that's hard to find. But even if it takes me a week to craft the right Google prompt to get it to finally spit out the obscure blog post I was envisioning, I am in no way the artist/writer who wrote that blog post. Ditto if I'm using convoluted methods to Google for an image. I am in no way the artist who created that image regardless of how time-intensive or difficult it was to search for it. And calling myself a writer or artist for being skilled at prompting Google (or a generative AI) is in my opinion using a very twisted definition of artist or writer.

If, on the other hand, you use Google Image search (or a generative AI) to retrieve hundreds of pictures and then you use those pictures as the raw materials to create a collage — and then you're directly manipulating the images, controlling their size, exact placement, saturation, etc. — then, sure, you're getting into artist territory.

But note that US courts currently don't think you're an artist even then. In fact, there was a recent case where someone laboriously created an entire comic using AI-generated images and tried to claim copyright for it. But the courts ruled that she wasn't the artist and thus couldn't claim copyright.

In other words, as for now, no one has been able to convince a judge that someone entering prompts into a generative AI is an artist :)