Can non-artists who use AI to create images be considered as artificial artists?

No. They are really no different from someone who commissions an actual painter to paint a picture of his dog. The AI is the artist.

More to the point, is that art in the first place, or is it simply copy/paste work?

@elbanditoroso
No, it is a denoising algorithm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CIpzeNxIhU

No. An artist is an artist. The AI is the paint brush/medium.

I think they are artists if they come up with the original idea and use AI to put on canvas what they imagined. If the AI is doing the imagining then it gets very sticky, but still maybe the artist is an artist as long as the end product is not an exact copy of someone else’s work.

I don’t think I’d consider them an artist. But I’d have to see how AI plays out in the future to cement an opinion.

Photography was not considered an Art form for such a very long time.

I think in time it will become a category of its own.

^^ Now that I can believe…that AI “art” will be a separate category.