Hi, person here who's drawn extensively with pencil as a kid but then slowed down. AI has reignited my passion for art, because unlike pencil or even digital drawing, you can iterate much more quickly, which allows me to do so while working a demanding job and having a life besides it. You are severely underestimating the amount of micro-decisions that go into AI art, and more importantly AI assisted art. If you'll allow me, let me explain.

Lets break it down into levels of effort and creative input, I like to refer back to photography since it has some comparison:

1. Empty canvas prompting.
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To me that is essentially the equivalent of taking a selfie or a random shot. On the scale of effort this is none to very little. But a prompt can be unique if you put an extreme amount of effort into specifying the exact details, just like a random shot can in fact be a very informed random shot.

You can put a rather massive amount of tokens into your prompt that all further specify this. At this point you can reasonably say you imagined at least the general look of the image before it was created. But you can't say you had any part in actually drawing it or significantly determined how it was drawn. It's basically impossible to get any kind of copyright protection over this unless you can back up your prompt very well, and only then would you get protection over your prompt, not what the AI drew.

2. Image to image
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You can feed an image into the AI, you add noise to the image, and let the AI try to remove that noise (After all, this is the exact same as it does on an empty canvas, but that is completely random noise). This means that a large part of your original image specifies how the AI will further try to denoise the image. As such, you are guiding a large part of how the AI moves forward. No other artist would likely use the same input image as you, so human decision making plays a bigger part here.

To me this is the equivalent of choosing a location you want to take a picture, and then scouting several locations to see which one works best. That's the micro-decisions sneaking in. You are giving the AI an existing image, either created by yourself, or from previous iterations.

At this point, you are essentially evolving an image. You are selecting attributes and design choices in the image you want to enhance and amplify. These are decisions the artists makes based on their view of how the final image will look like. Every iteration adds more decisions that no other artist would take the same way.

3. Collaboration.
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The point where AI starts becoming a tool. You don't start with point 1, or at least only use point 1 for brainstorming. You imagine the image beforehand, just like you would do with pencil. You can develop the image as much as you would like before going to the AI. You are making the exact micro decisions you are with drawing by hand, since it's essentially the same up to this point. A photographer at this point would work out every fine detail before snapping the picture.

Except for the fact that you know you are going to be using an AI, so certain aspects need more or less refinement to properly be enhanced by the use of AI. Just like you don't start the same if you're going to make a painting, or a silhouette, or any other kind of technique. At some point, you return the image to the AI and mostly perform step #2, perhaps returning to brainstorming with step #1 if you want to add or remove from your existing design.

4. AI truly as a tool.
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Now to make something actually with #3, you start doing this process in iterations. Constantly going back and forth between photoshop and the AI, sometimes you spend days in photoshop, other times you spend days refining a part of the image with AI. There are also additional techniques like ControlNet, LoRAs, different models, different services, that can drastically enhance how well you get to what you want. A photographer at this point would take as many shots as they would need using their creatively controlled setup, and find the best on among them. Different lenses, different vocal lengths, different lighting (if applicable), different actions in the shot.

Sadly, most people that talk confidently about how much they hate AI just know point #1 and maybe point #2. But I see point #3 and #4. And when I talk to artists that haven't yet picked up on AI, but if they are aware (or made aware) of #3 and #4, suddenly their perspective also changes in regards to AI. But the hostility and the blind anger makes it quite hard to get through to people that not all art with AI is made equally. We should encourage people that want to use AI to reach the point of #3 and #4 so that their creative input is significant to the point it's actually something produced by their human creativity. And this is also where an existing artist switching to using AI will most likely start off from.

Also, in terms of time. #1 might take seconds, #2 might take minutes to hours, but #3 and #4 can take days or weeks. Still not as long as drawing those same pieces by hand, but sometimes I wish it was as easy as people would make it out to be.