I have to say that when I focused on computer-aided graphic design, my instructors who had done that kind of work with material supplies totally felt my work was invalid.

And when I was writing essays in high-school English and getting downgraded for poor penmanship, my teacher refused to let me word-process my work, lest I write a whole essay with the touch of a button.

So yes, creators have had their efforts minimized from the dawn of time, especially as new technology makes output better or easier.

Still, this isn't about the art, it's about the capitalism. If we had a society where no-one had to toil for a meager existence, then artists could do their thing for the sake of creating beauty and not to earn a buck. I believe post-war social programs in the UK drove the Rock-&-Roll revolution in the 1960s (advancements in electric guitars also did some heavy lifting).

So... feed our artists?

Same goes for lightning a fire without and with a lighter.

But you are creating the image as it's often never what you intended on the first try. If anything they are editors, and last I checked we aren't taking any rights away from editors. Someone else made the material and "you" manipulated it into a better product or into what your vision actually was.

Even if I were to grant you that generative AI is just "describing an illustration": other people say there is a world of difference between painting something with your hands and using a mouse, yet I think digital illustration is as real as physical illustration. Yet other people say there is a world of difference between creating something from the ground up and using store-bought materials and tools, yet I don't discount artists who do just that.

But I don't grant you that, because if I simply describe an illustration, the generative AI will not give me anything close to what I want. I have to learn the prompting language of the model (what words and phrases result in what?), I have to learn the influence the many different parameters have on the output, and I have to learn how to use things like prompt weighting, negative prompts and the like to get what I want. It's something completely different from describing an illustration.

And that's ignoring things like variant generation, inpainting, outpainting and the many different things that are completely removed from just "describing an illustration".