Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
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.