I don't think that it's a strict binary of "art is not just another product of labor" and "artist and art are separate entities". Surely you've heard some variation of the turn of phrase "separating the art from the artist" over the last handful of years, even before this most recent boom in "AI art."

I'm writing this at 5am in a weird anxiety-induced sleep-procrastination HN session so I'm having trouble pinpointing and articulating the je ne sais quoi, but maybe some examples will meander gradually towards it: I've read many novels that I thought were good and knew nothing of the authors but the name (isn't this part of the point of a nom de plume?) and I've read novels I thought were middling, sometimes by the very same names. I know nothing about the artists of street murals I occasionally walk by, and I know nothing about the artists of non-mural graffiti tags along walls and overpasses on the very same roads, and I know nothing about the artists of phallic scrawls on the walls of the bathroom stalls I use along the way, but there's a pretty clear ordering of their artistic merits based on some ethereal non-quantitative aesthetic quality despite all being ostensibly "art". I'm not an art buff, but when I first encountered the works of Caravaggio, I found them to be a master class in form and light that resonated with me on some level, and I still thought that after eventually reading about his brawls and exile due to the murder/manslaughter of Tommasoni. Sometimes it'll take more than a year between discovering a musician or band that I enjoy, listening through their oeuvre, and finally reading their Wikipedia article (or Soundcloud/Twitter bio, for the sufficiently obscure). For some, it never happens. In the hoi polloi art form of standup comedy, I can still laugh hard at Louis C.K. or John Mulaney or Bill Cosby despite knowing stories about their lives off of the stage that paint them in a bad light, and I can laugh just as hard at the tight 5 or crowdwork or even the recorded album of someone I've never heard of, if the material and delivery have that non-quantitative quality of, well, being funny.

I don't find my art consumption habits or perspective troubling or chilling. I'm willing to celebrate what humanity is capable of without celebrating a specific subset of humans, or even knowing what subset of humans are worth celebrating.

It's like how I try hard to write clean yet robust code at work, but am not bothered that even when I hit the mark, it will only be appreciated by those within my corporate walls, and fade when I or the organization am gone. You can run the "git blame", sure, but "it's just code" - today's "big wins" are tomorrow's "legacy garbage". Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But hey, I've struggled with lifelong chronic solipsism, so maybe this perspective is chilling to you nevertheless. I'm a real human, there's a "me" in here. I don't like to think that what makes me smile - and why/how - is any more a canary for our march towards oblivion than anyone else's smile-inducers.