> I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all.

This might sound pedantic, but I think it's very meaningful when it comes to art: AI's cannot (yet) produce paintings anywhere near the quality of a human painting. What they can produce are images of paintings, and those are not the same thing.