For the curious, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin are a good place to start for answering these questions.

as of yet, there’s still no such thing as a print created entirely by a machine. Someone made the scan, prepared the print file, chose the paper stock, proofed the prints. Or at least some of those steps, depending on the print.

The point is, there’s no print that is 1:1 equivalent to an original painting. There are artistic choices embedded throughout the process that influence the result and make one print different than another, which people might consider more or less accurate, or faithful, or beautiful, or artistic.

It’s easy to assume an image is just an image, a bunch of pixels with defined numerical values. But the real world has so much more detail than that.

C’est ne pas une ~~pipe~~ Mona Lisa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

A print is a faithful copy of the original art. No additional artistic or expressive intent went into the mass production of the print.

It’s a print of a piece of art.

There's not one answer.

IMO the original painting is art, a faithful copy is also lesser art, but a print is not art, because it takes significantly less skill and creativity to print thousands of it. It isn't worthless nor slop, though.

Basically, art speaks to our sensibilities, so we expect to find a message in there. LLMs can't create, only mix-and-match what exists in their training data set. You could slop a new painting, make a special canvas printer, and exhibit it in a blind test. Some people will think it's art because they find meaning in it, while others will think it's not art because they'll recognize several meanings slopped together in a nonsensical way.

In reality, it was never art, because the creator, a statistical algorithm, never had any message to convey in the first place.