By convention, we're using the term artist only for people. Midjourney is not a person, it's a tool. Just like a Gravatar image is not made by the artist Gravatar, it's made by a generator, using rules and some input. Midjourney's rules come from all the stuff it saw when it was trained, and its input comes from humans entering text prompts. You could argue the same applies to human artists, but that doesn't make them equivalent just because they have some things in common.

So, Midjourney is not an artist. But is a person entering a prompt an artist or not? I would argue that there are people skilled and creative at engineering prompts, or further refining the generated outputs. It's not NOT art. Then again, that has always been a matter of interpretation.

> But a machine can only copy. Or you're saying a machine can be an artist.

That's a very Hollywood interpretation. Obviously a machine can be an artist, because humans are also machines (unless you're arguing for the supernatural).

As I said above, the common convention is that an artist should be a person. We have long ago decided that a person can use tools, including generative algorithms, to make what is considered art. However, nobody is obligated to appreciate any given artwork, so I don't see what's being lost if we just let this development play out.

> So - with as few words as possible, who is the artist of that picture?

(HN won't let me reply to your question below directly, so I'll add it here). In your opinion, does every picture HAVE to be made by an artist? If your answer is "yes", then the artist is the human entering the prompt, although the artistic work may have been quite minimal. If your answer is "no", or "it depends on the result", there may be no artist.

Let's say a camera takes a picture of a public place every few minutes and puts it online. Who's the artist?