What a high-minded defense of two pull quotes and ‘get a load of this guy.’ You’re winding yourself up over “my statement,” when your statement was a dismissive scoff.

And speaking to everything else you’ve said - CGI is not the part an artist did.

You’ve drawn razor-sharp distinction between a prompt and an image, between score and music, between art and… pictures. Modeling and rigging and posing and framing are not what an audience looks at. They only see the render. A computer did that part. An artist did all that underlying work… but the picture is something else.

Yet obviously we’d both say CGI is art. That specific image only exists because of the effort put in by people. They used tools that make some things easy and other things trivial. We would not say real art requires creating perspective manually, and letting the machine do it is cheating. The technical details barely matter when someone puts feelings in your brain.

Except here, this new thing is different, so they faked it and it doesn’t count.