Like a completely mad or autistic artist that is creating interesting imagery but has no clue what it means.

Autists usually have no trouble understanding the world around them. Many are just unable to interface with it the way people normally do.

It’s a reflection of our society in a weird mirror.

Well yes, it’s trained on human output. Cultural biases and shortcomings in our species will be reflected in what such an AI spits out.

When you sit there thinking up or refining prompts you’re basically outsourcing the imaginative visualizing part of your brain. […] So AI generation is at least some portion of the artistic or creative process but not all of it.

We use a lot of devices in our daily lives, whether for creative purposes or practical. Every such device is an extension of ourselves; some supplement our intellectual shortcomings, others physical. That doesn’t make the devices capable of doing any of the things we do. We just don’t attribute actions or agency to our tools the way we do to living things. Current AI possess no more agency than a keyboard does, and since we don’t consider our keyboards to be capable of authoring an essay, I don’t think one can reasonably say that current AI is, either.

A keyboard doesn’t understand the content of our essay, it’s just there to translate physical action into digital signals representing keypresses; likewise, an LLM doesn’t understand the content of our essay, it’s just translating a small body of text into a statistically related larger body of text. An LLM can’t create a story any more than our keyboard can create characters on a screen.

Only once/if ever we observe AI behaviour indicative of agency can we start to use words like “creative” in describing its behaviour. For now (and I suspect for quite some time into the future), all we have is sophisticated autocomplete.