But you will be able to make those directed changes, and soon. You can even do some of it now, with OpenAI's current tools. So it is evasive to just lean on "it's not here now" when we all know it will be, and soon.
OpenAI just implemented inpainting into Dall-E, but they are far from being the leaders in this. They are more laggards, because they cater to the "make pretty pictures quick" market, not people who have a specific image in mind and try to get it to physical/digital form.
I want to know from people that are planting flags in the ground what their line is.
I'd say a director is an artist, a caveman puting his muddy hand on the wall an artist if his intent was so (and not experimenting a slightly ahead-of-his-time biometric access control to his cave) and so on. As long as you make something in your mind, freely, and give it some form (which can be... nothing, the art piece Promenade is based on random visitors deambulating among objects, not objects themselves, but I wouldn't say the visitors create the art, but the one who imagined the concept, even if he didn't do anything actually).
I also understand that people could honestly say that Richard Serra isn't really an artist if his contribution was just to put a series of objectfs he didn't made in a room and told people to go in and say "that's my art". And there are precendent of bad reaction: the same artist created Tilted arc, with is a simple tilted arc of steel and put in the middle of a place. It wasn't random, as he had taken minutious care to analyze the path people would take in this square and he put it in the most inconvenient place, to force people to go around and prompt more human interaction this way. It was taken down some time later because lots of people failed to acknowledge this as art but saw just an impractical, ugly, rusty wall of steel. Well, no one is a prophet in his own land, I guess.
But even if his art wasn't well received, he is thought as the artist, despite not having cast the iron wall himself nor having put it there with his own hands:
So I'd say someone using a series of tools, irrespective of their nature, to make a specific image he wants to create into physical/digital form is an artists. Someone creating "any kind of image quickly to answer a need, like me when illustrating a scene for a campaign journal, where something roughly matching is enough" would be less so, same with someone making commissioned things, if their goal isn't to create something in their mind but something to your specification. Much like IP laws works with attributing copyright to the people creating the thing and the person commissionning it, depending on the level of involvement in the final result of the commision-paying person. If the commissioned is just executing the specification with absolutely no leeway for creative input, the copyright will belong to the person guiding the hand.
So for me the dividing line would be "whose creative input it is?" and not how the realization (if any) is done.
Additional question: who is the creator of the art that is a roleplay session in RPG store, using a commercial module? Are the players artists, and if they are not, why are theatrical actors artists?
Also, I'd be surprised if a commonly-agreed definition of what is art can be reached in this thread.