GGAdams AI is not art, you are correct on that. And yeah, I do cringe a little from seeing people saying it's their work, although that has happened like... Just once x).
However, AI is a tool that can aid artists that won't act like grandpas saying "back in my times we used pencils!", tech advances, and artists should keep up with times. It is like web developers before and after frontpage (and other similar softwares).
People may act like holy knights quoting morality, but not all AI models are trained on copyright material.
Adobe, for instance, has been using AI for quite some time now and they went all in with times by producing "Adobe Firefly", but you do not need to use that to get "morally right" AI generated images, just pick a model that fits your morality.
AI can be used in many (right) ways, and can even make old questionable practices (photobashing, for instance) even more "morally right" since photobashing often used copyrighted work, which wouldn't be the case with AI.
However, there are as many wrong and lazy ways of using AI, and they are pretty much the ones you mentioned in your posts.