Well said.
Paul Delaroche was an incredible painter. On the invention of photography, he said "From this day, painting is dead." He was a French dude, so probably pretty dramatic. But here we are, still enjoying his paintings, and the paintings of others so many decades on. I'd argue that some of his renderings are completely unsurpassed by modern artists - he told the narratives of his time using the best skills he had. And they were nothing short of incredible. I have a print of his work in my hallway. I look at it everyday.
Yes, we can curate prompts. I've done that before, at length - and if you dig far enough into the blockchain, you'll find that creative process and my train of thought as I worked on stuff that I dedicated probably too much time into. It is laughable given how much progress the image models now have - but they are still highly deterministic with their outputs - new models such as Qwen more so, when even moving the random seed by millions of numbers, still produces a result very similar to the seeds that are numerically distant from it.
I have not heard any people at the local gallery openings I've visited despair about how AI art will destroy their creative practice. It hasn't destroyed mine, in fact, it has given me another series of tools to use - and knowing when and how to use them is an important element in understanding why the injection of our human imperfection into the process makes that human imperfection so special.