alt Hacker NewsWell, is Pixar’s Toy Story a work of art? Or what about Julia set renderings, where people make choices about the colors? ;)
Tongue-in-cheek aside, I do think I agree with you in that (1) art, as perceived by us human meatbags, is art because of the human element of it (if not in creation, then in perception), and that (2) AI absent explicit steering trends towards a rather bland medium.
But there’s art in everything from the blurry, out of focus, disposable film cameras, to a 5-year-old’s crayon scribble scrabbles, to the neon glitter themes we used to copy-paste over our geocities and xanga pages, and as frustrating as it is to our own sensibilities, an AI prompt “draw a pink elephant” isn’t all that different.
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But it completely is different. To you point its why a 5 year old's crayon scribble is more powerful to certain people than Guernica for instance. History is littered with gazillions of scribbles, stray notes, meaningless stuff that just goes straight in the bin. AI will do that. But for something communicates the feeeell of something you need warmth and emotional relatability.
The element of creation is central to art. A painting or a photo of a sunset can be art, but the sunset itself is not art.
In addition, the communication doesn't need to be explicit or intentional. It can be communicating something antithetical to the artist's original intent like a blurry and out of focus photo. Or it can even be antithetical to the piece itself like a lot of modern art (Fountain[1] comes to mind). I'm also sure that the 5-year-old will happily tell you a story about why they scribbled what they did. I'm not diminishing any of those. But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)