You've missed the point, entirely. I'm not talking about credit, I'm talking about capability. By any measure, the image at the top of the article is polished and it grabs your attention, and if an artist had made it by hand, even experienced artists would commend their solid technical art skills. It also sucks so much at accomplishing its job as a communication tool that it detracts from the article content for many people. A layman having powerful image generation tools doesn't make them capable of communicating ideas visually any more than copilot makes laymen capable of designing sane software architecture, or having Grammarly would make them any better technical writers. People that don't think so don't realize how much they don't understand about solving communication problems with imagery. There are plenty of lifelong fine artists that could whip my ass making compelling imagery in physical media, but would still need years to learn the fundamentals of visual communication. It's a set of skills that need to be learned and practiced, and making the images themselves is probably the least consequential part of it. Art directors generally don't make any images at all, and the idea that someone could step in and do their job because they could whip up a bunch of slick-looking junk at a prompt is beyond hilarious.
What is an "art director" though? We're talking about artists. There's a reason they don't share the same title and everybody knows it.
Auteur theory exists for good reason. Good art cannot be imagined merely in the mind, only self-flatulating bullshit can. One must engage and prove and iterate and exercise all the unlikely leaps that must be made to go from medium to meaning to detail. Image generators are just shitty art directors and neither is practicing art.
