Until then, my point remains: DALL-E is currently like an (extraordinarily good) hat that you can put words in and extract phrases out of. A human chooses what words to put in and which of the phrases they take out are better. Unlike pulling words out of a hat, the network has some criteria by which it produces phrases, but that's not enough to call it an artist.

This is not meant to minimize how good the achievement of this network is. The level of fidelity and even understanding of the prompts is extraordinary. But its purpose is not to be creative, it is to find a point on a hyperplane that matches the input it received. It is currently at the level of a tool - though there are potential advancements that could yet turn it into an artist in its own right.

When DALL-E x.0 does that, and when it also generates similar quality from much higher-level prompts ("paint a sad picture", or "social commentary on BLM" or something like this, instead of a description of what the picture should show and in what style), then I for one will be in complete agreement that it's indeed an artist in itself.

Personally, I don't expect this to happen in the next few decades, as I don't think the current approaches are very promising for the type of intelligence that you would need to actually do this type of reasoning, but that remains to be seen, and I am fully confident that it will happen some day.