This whole argument just seems so unproductive and pointless

To be clear, my view is that AI cannot do art (by the very definition of what art is, in the philosophical sense).

What it can do is illustration. Does this mean that many people will lose their jobs? Yes, absolutely. But that's only a problem because of capitalism, not generative AI itself. That's simply a consequence of technological progress. Illustration can involve art, in the same way that the job of a scribe in the 1200s had certain artistic elements. But I don't see many people today going around complaining that the printing press took away scribes' jobs.