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You try to appeal to emotion and you try to define art and claim your definition is the truth and your logic than goes, that ai works are not art, because of intrinsically lacking soul and value or whatever. If I misunderstood, sorry. But your post came across to me, as you try the worth of art angle to argue against ai.

And you did not pick up my examples of situations where the output and method to achieve that output are in a way, that might contradict your definitions of "truth".  What you argue about does not even target ai usage in specific, it only targets low effort. If you want to argue for ai avoidance, you need better arguments.

So tell me, is a musical conductor doing art? And who creates the music? Who does the work and who is credited for the orchestra's performance?

Who is creating the photo? The photographer or the camera? Who is doing the art, and by which skills exactly?

it's about the value of art again: You've had yourself a child and this child draws you a picture with crayons that says "Daddy" or "Mommy" and it's a picture of you. It's completely technically bad and has no good perspective, composition etc. - you're still in love with the picture. You still hang it up on your fridge and you smile when you see it. You go to your close friend's house and you look at their fridge and there's a drawing of them by their child, and you smile again. You can ask an AI to generate you 10,000,000 "cute crayon drawing by a child for their parent" and you'll get exactly what you asked for. Would you smile? Would you be able to say any of them belong on any fridge? The soul is missing, I hope you can see the point I'm trying to make.

Your premise is, that the child's drawing is art. And you go on to defeat this premise, by the phrases "still hang it up". "still in love". So you display the drawing, knowing it is not art, but because of other reasons. That reason is, that it makes you smile. That smile is not art apreciation, but the feeling it invokes of the knowlege that your child is happy and makes you happy. Same for your friend's child, where you go awwwww, how cute. That reason is the keepsake aspect. That drawing makes you think of these things.

If a drawing appears to you, that was not made by your child or another child, but you would know that an adult artist attempting naive style had drawn it, it would not invoke those feelings. You would either reject it as art, because of the things you said about good perspective and composition or eye rollingly accept it as "naive art made by an established artist" and just ignore it and sure would not hang it on your living room wall.

If your child played around with "my kids first ai bot" and selected a favorite picture the bot made, you do might print that out and hang it on the fridge to celebrate your kid's success on operating a piece of tech at a very young age. Or maybe your child can't draw physically because of an ailment, so it makes you smile when you see that picture, because it reminds you of your child still being able to do some things other kids do with the help of technology. 

That crayon pic's value is not defined by soul or artistic value. It's value is defined by your emotional connection to it. And that could also be just a twig the kid brought home from a walk in the woods. And, yes, also a toenail clipping. When clipped, it sprung to your older kids cereal and the sibling almost ate it and the whole family had a really good lough after a long season of bad weather. So you kept the clipping to remind you of that happy day.

I do see the point you were trying to make, and I see how and why it misses. I condensed your point and my response into the observation, that this crayon pic is not art, but memorabilia.

Another interpretation would be, you claim the crayon pic is art by another definition, and that an ai made pic would not be able to meet that definition and therefore, lacking the soul, is not art. But the crayon pic itself fails that definition, because it is not the soul in the work that makes it art worth keeping, but your emotional connection to that pic. And that is something you can establish to an output of ai as well. Like, for example, if your child was the ai operator and made a special pic for you.

Oh, and that crayon pic is art, but mostly in the sense of art being anything created by a human. There is a reason for the word artificial. Which reminds me of artificial intelligence. But until we have ai bots that have actual agency, any ai still needs a human operator. Which makes the output of an ai, a human made thing, or in other words: art.

The effort put into the actual making is greatly reduced and transfered into other skills, like prompt crafting and the selection process. But that is a similar process as has already happenend in the established art of photography. The modern photographer can get away with pressing the button hundreds of times a minute and selecting the good pics afterwards. Selecting the light and arranging/directing the objects/models is the analog of the prompt crafting.

Anyway, putting low effort into ai usage is easy. But you do can put a lot of effort and soul into it. Most people that published ai works, will be of the type that put little to no effort into it. Or rather, the minium amount of effort to achieve the result. Is it art? Yes. Is it worth apreciating? Usually no. But that goes for works of established artists as well. Some of these things are just called art out of habbit.

So my stance is, that we need better arguments against ai. The arguments that only target things that will apply to non-ai art as well, are not good enough.

For games, I like the microwave analogy. I would not accept microwaved premade food in a fancy restaurant.