"With today’s tools — including AI — it’s no longer necessary for artists to learn a craft. What matters is the content, the idea. It doesn’t matter what tools you use if you achieve it.”
The word "art" etymologically derives from older words meaning "skill" or "craft." Doing stuff that doesn't require skill or craft is not art by definition, even if it looks like it.
You're not an artist if you do this. But it's okay. Artists throughout history have always lived with the rest of the world being apathetic to art and confusing making copies of things with the artistic process. This age is no different, except copies can be made easier and faster.
That being said, it sounds like we're really close to me being able to type in a description of something and receive an AI-generated sculpture of it, hopefully with a 3D preview. Awesome, but we're also seeing some really disturbing authoritarian trends lately, and we're likely going to see a lot of ideas get labelled as harmful and blocked from being used by AI tools. So I don't see this leading to any type of utopia for anyone other than the owners of these technologies.
If the art is wholly ai, I agree with you, you are no artist. Similarly, if you outsourced 100% of the creative act to hired help, I would say the same.
But most people can’t do everything. How would you view art where the artist relies on AI for the pieces they can’t do? If I play guitar but an ai wrote the drum part, is that art? What if I write the book but ai made the illustrations?