Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
That’s probably ComfyUI, one of the more popular open source tools. You are right, it is visual programming. Mixing text, reference images, and a lot of other items into models to output images. I can easily see someone spending hours to get a single image out of it, but then it becomes a bit of a reusable pipeline. It’s a cool tool, and, if as someone else in this comment chain said that art is a study of choice, then the output is arguably art. I’m not sure I’d go that far with it, but I have a hard time calling my programming art as well, although it meets most of the definitions of it, and is certainly a creative act.