NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
when you commission an AI image creation system to create an image for you, you're enlisting the skills of the people who create and maintain said system, and the skills of the artists that have created the images said system has been fed. Which is why you can use prompts to directly rip off the visual problem solving of living artists like Greg Rutkowski (This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it.). It's a tool which subcontracts the act of image creation after all.
It's not like the prompter does any visual problem solving in the act of prompting, so it's fundamentally not the same as say using a tool to fill an area with a colour.
The builders/maintainers of the AI system are akin to the programmers of Photoshop, who don't get credited when that program is used to create images. Otherwise you could make the same argument. You can even more directly rip off the visual problem solving of others by using copy+paste. In any case you're still using a tool that does not and cannot sign a contract, so it makes no sense to say that using an AI image model is "subcontracting".
eta
"AI model will blindly output shit that makes no sense" but image creation AI systems have sense baked in based on the artists work that's been scraped to feed the image creation system, just as when I was QAing an image recognition system, doubt was baked in, and sending off an image to it would return a list of things the system thought the image was, along with with a percentage of how sure it was for each response in the JSON response.
The sense is part of the training data, because that was created by people, but there's no guarantee that said sense will carry over into the output of the model, because AI models are senseless stochastic processes that operate by mindlessly throwing shit at a wall until we decide that something sticks. That's why your employer hired you to do QA work, because you're a person who can actually check these things.