Always good to start an argument with name calling. Did you actually want a discussion or did you want to post your opinion and pretend it’s the only true one in a topic as subjective as the definition of art?

Just because someone isn’t able to discern whether someone has put more effort into something doesn’t mean that person lacks skill. A lot of people would not be able to tell some modern art from a child’s art, that doesn’t invalidate the artists skill. There are some people though who can tell the modern art painting and recognize the different decisions the artist made, just as someone can tell whether someone put effort and meaning into a piece of art generated by AI. There’s always the obvious deformities an errors that it may spit out, but there’s also other tendencies the AI has that most are not aware of but someone who has studied it can recognize and can recognize the way the author may or may not have handled it.

Back to the camera argument all those options and choices you listed of saturation, focus, shutter speed … can also be put into an AI prompt to get that desired effect. Do those choices have any less of a meaning because someone entered a word instead of turning a dial on a camera? Does a prompt maker convey less of a feeling of isolation to the subject by entering “shallow depth of field” as a photographer who had configured there camera to do so? Could someone looking at the piece not recognize that choice and realize the meaning that was conveyed?

As for your final argument about it being used to farm clicks and ad dollars, that’s just art in capitalism. Most art these days is made for the same purposes of advertising and marketing, because artists need to eat and corporations looking to sell products are one of the few places willing to give them money for their work. If anything AI art allows more messages that are less friendly to consumerism to flourish since it’s less constrained by the cash needed to pay a highly technically trained artist.

It’s obviously horrible in the near term for the artist but long term if they realize there position they may come ahead. AI needs human originated art to keep going or it may devolve into a self referential mess. If the artists realize there common interests and are able to control the use of there art they may be able to regain an economic position and sell it to the AI training companies. The companies would probably want more differentiated art to freshen the collapsing median AI tends towards so they get to make the avant-garde art while the ad drivel and click farming is left to the AI. This would require a lot of government regulation but it’s the only positive outcome I can see from this so anything on that path, like the watermarking, would be good.