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Your point was to elevate art to some expression of the soul and you claim that this is an objective criteria. And since ai have no soul, what they create is not art. No matter how good it looks. And what humans create is art, no matter how bad it looks.

My definition of art involves skill. You need to apply skill and apply it masterful. Your definition seems to require putting your soul into the work. What exactly is art and what is not, is a philosphical debate that is ongoing and unresolved for thousands of years. There was a shift like 300 years ago, to the non crafty appliance of art and consider them more artsy, especially if the result is aesthetically pleasing or invokes emotion.

Under the emotional soul expression criteria, practically all video games are not art. They are commercially driven and people draw and write, what brings profit. That's not soul pouring, that's devoid of soul. Some indie games will be a lot better in that aspect.

You also seem to put value on lazyness or non lazyness. So is an artist that switches from analog to digital no longer creating art, because of the lazyness involved by selecting the tool that is faster? Is a photographer no longer creating art, because it takes a second to take a picture, instead of long preparations it took a hundred years ago? Is an artist that trained for weeks not an artist, because some artists have trained for years? What about talent. What about that child drawing? There is no training at all, yet you elevated it to art, because of the emotions.

Anyway, there are no universally agreed upon criteria. So there are no objective criteria. And there is nothing specific in your critera, that denies art status to ai output. An ai operator learning how to operate an ai and spending time to get the perfect prompt and then selecting the perfect image, that will invoke the emotions and represents the feelings put into the work would satisfy your requirements, would it not.

the value still comes from the mortal being spending time behind it

If time spent would be the only criteria, all ai outputs would be art. Bad and lazy art usually, but art.

In other words: the parts of the game a human being poured themselves into are the parts you value, and the generated parts are the parts you don't. 

No. I might still apreciate the ai pics. It's just harder to see the skill there and easier to appreciate other aspects of a game. It's just not a selling point to me. And neither would badly hand drawn art be a selling point to me, for that matter. You would have to do extraordinairy things with ai, to peek my interest. Like OP did. I am not here to appreciate art in a game. The premise is wrong. Also, it is in contrast to professional commercial games. There I would not tolerate it, because in my opinion they should spend their budget on commissioning art. It is not because of art considerations that I would not tolerate it there.

You accept that the drawing has value completely independent of technique and you just called it memorabilia (which is art) instead of art

No, memorabilila are not art. And their value is not an artistic value. They have a function. It is what they represent. A toenail clipping can be a memorabilila.

It is possible to hand infinite monkeys infinite typewriters, and one of them will write Shakespeare. 

Not in a physical universe. Although, you would need a photographer lector to sieve through all those works and identify the good works, and that act would be the actual art. It is not the skill of writing, but the skill to identify the artistic sunset writing.

You know how in sports, when an athlete is caught using steroids

Ahh. The fairness argument. But that only holds if you would enter different games into the same jam and some of those used ai. And would therefore somehow perform better. For one thing, they do not, because people do not like ai very much. Using ai actually hurts the game. And in the open market you cannot use the fairness argument. What't the fairness between an AAA game and an indie game made by a hobby dev. You can't compare those. 

But you might mean the tainted blood argument in combination with the assumption that ai is the taint and games need to be pure. You will not convince coders of this, for ai usage in code - and those do use vibe coding as an insult. You will have better chances with people that want to look at human made graphics. But then again, there is a huge lot of rendered graphics, procedurally generated. There is not much human in those.

But it would work for the places, where human made assets would compete with ai made assets. 

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My general point in ai discussions or rather anti ai discussions is, that people are doing it wrong. Shortsighted mostly. Like ethical consideration about stealing, if implemented legally, would just lead to legally and thus ethically trained data, and the argument would be compeletely negated and there still would be ai. Power consumption for a thing like image creation is trivially negated. You can run such a thing on your desktop with less power needed than it would require to play a 3d game. And you will get an image every few seconds. There is a huge power waste in ai, but not for the things complained about in images for video games. And the using the lazy tool arguments are going on for as long as people invent tech to make life easier.

You bring an art argument, but that is not against ai specifically. Just some arbitrary criteria, that will hit actual art as well. But what is art is debated anyway. Also, ai are still operated by humans, so what is created this way, can still be considered art, even under your criteria. Not all of it, but some. And even if we would consider it not to be art, what would that change? Same as me, most people that play games are not in it for the art apreciation.