a person who want to make a good AI image can take hours or days improving and tweaking the workflow.
No, no, you're confusing effort with meaning. This is a literacy problem: I venture to guess you don't even understand the distinction I'm drawing.
The most complicated comfyUI-whatever is worth less to me than a child's drawing of their parents because the child's drawing is communicating love while the generated one is communicating nothing.
I am being a tinge hyperbolic here, but I have yet to see anything made by AI-hornies that was worthy of discussion. The lot of them can't even explain their own work—at best they can explain their comfyUI workflow because that's the thing they actually put effort into.
If you want AI art to be taken seriously, you must understand what art is.
You must stop selfishly invading the space other artists inhabit: photography was a paradigm shift, yeah, but it still left room for painters to do their own thing. In the modern day, there is hardly confusion about whether something is or is not a photograph.
You must stop pretending that spectacle is all art aspires to be. So many people complain that they can't be artists because they can't draw a professional character portrait—who asked you? Who asked you to do that? Does Minecraft, one of the most beloved games of all time, care that its block textures are all 16x16 color smudges?
One of my favorite youtube channels, Any Austin, has a series where he finds and appreciates the odd, forgotten, unremarkable places in games that players often overlook. Liminal spaces that exist just to fill out the map. A valley between a mountain and a cliff that has nothing in it. The canopy above a forest hallway you'd normally only ever see once because a fast travel point exists just beyond it.
Now, nobody minds that Minecraft is procedurally generated: this is an algorithm in art. But you know what you can't do in Minecraft? Talk about its liminal spaces. Any spaces like this that it might have can't be shared unless someone has your world seed, and any questions you might have all have the same answer: "The algorithm just did it like that. I don't know." There is no story told in these walls.
This doesn't mean that Minecraft is bad. This doesn't mean Minecraft shouldn't be procedurally generated. But something is lost here.
You must understand this if you want to be taken seriously.