Very good points. You are better with words than I am. I see similar issues as you, but expressed them differently.
The pure skill aspect is very visible with a street painter that makes caricatures in a few minutes. I believe there are photo filters on phones that do similar.
And the non skill expression aspect is very visible with a toddler happily fingerpainting.
There is a little simile with the work of canvas painters and photographers. A photographer need not know how to paint. But what he creates is a picture. So is it art? It is not even artificial (before the rise of photoshop). With the skill definition it is of course art. You need to know what you are doing, or your photos do look boring or even mechanicaly bad, like unfocused. But you did not create what is seen in the picture. You only chose what of the hundreds of snapshots you took will be released.
So in a way, what an AI operator does has similarities with what a photographer does. And tickling out good AI images also takes skill. If you take photos of humans you even need to give them directions. So my best guess would be, that the best AI operators would currently be good photographers that grasp the language they need to instruct the AI.