You put “old slogan that supposedly exists” in scare quotes like I invented it. I didn’t. You just never looked. 2011 DeviantArt journal, title printed in all caps: “DIGITAL ART IS NOT ART!!” deviantart.com/zhourules/jou… Fans told a digital artist that drawing on a tablet was “worse than burning original art.” They said “this would look great as a real painting.” They said they’d be “much more impressed if you used real paint.” They said undo meant it didn’t count. 2014 Envato published a whole explainer because the line was already a stock insult: digital isn’t real art, real artists can’t just undo a mistake. design.tutsplus.com/articles… 2018 YouTube title, not a secret blog: “digital painting isn’t REAL painting.” The creator said the argument had already been running for decades. youtube.com/watch?v=JFON73Ua… 2019 Krita forum thread, title: “How do you deal with the ‘digital art is not real art’ people?” krita-artists.org/t/how-do-y… The exact lines in the original post are “it’s just digital” and “the computer is doing all the work.” Replies: “the computer does the work,” “computers are for cheating,” “as made by a computer it has no value.” 2022 article lists it as Myth #3, word for word: “Digital art is not real art.” hustle.com.sg/reads/debunked… That slogan existed. Working artists were answering it for years. You don’t get to put “supposedly” in front of a documented insult and call that a rebuttal. You keep saying you never claimed digital art wasn’t art, so you can’t be a hypocrite. That is not the charge. I do not need your name on a 2004 forum post. The charge is that you inherited a medium that was dismissed with “the computer does it,” “you’re not doing the work,” and “that isn’t a real artist,” then you reused the same lines on the next tool and pretended history only counts if you personally typed the old version. You said an AI artist isn’t actually an artist. You said I’m not doing the work. You said I’m plugging random words into a program that generates it all for me. You said I can’t call myself a visual artist because a written prompt is “visualizing it all” for me. That is the old slogan. You changed the noun and left the argument standing. “Random words into a program” is not how the medium works. That is how you need it to work so the slogan still fits. You are describing a tourist typing one sentence and hitting generate. You are not describing reference, iteration, constraints, inpainting, compositing, correction, or overpaint. Traditionalists did the same thing to digital. They flattened Photoshop, Painter, custom brushes, and Ctrl+Z into “the computer does all the work.” They were wrong about the process then. You are wrong about the process now. If you do not understand the medium, the argument you make against it is worthless. “With digital art you’re still making it yourself by hand, same as pencils and brushes.” That was the defense digital artists used against people like you, not a law of the universe. Traditionalists rejected that defense. They said the stylus wasn’t a real brush. They said layers and undo were cheating. They said filters and art functions were the machine doing the work. Wayne Reynolds, working illustrator, 2011: a lot of digital artists “let the machine do the work for them” and “rely on the art functions.” blackgate.com/2011/03/02/art… You accepted the tool after that fight. You do not get to pretend the fight never happened so you can run it again one product generation later. You already gave up the purity test. “You don’t have to create the supplies yourself.” Correct. Then the line is no longer “the artist must personally produce every mark with no assistance.” The line is wherever you feel comfortable standing today. That is not a principle. If prompting “visualizes it for you,” then a camera visualizes a photograph, a renderer visualizes a 3D scene, a custom brush visualizes a mark you did not construct bristle by bristle, and generative fill already inside digital programs visualizes areas you did not paint stroke by stroke. You do not get to bless those tools and then act like the next one magically stops being a tool. “You can’t call yourself a visual artist.” That is the same sentence as “pick up a pencil.” It was used on photographers. It was used on digital painters. It was used on anyone who touched a machine. Baudelaire called photography art’s “most mortal enemy” and a refuge for lazy failed painters. Delaroche looked at a daguerreotype and said painting was dead. The medium is in museums now. Your certainty does not make you the exception to that pattern. You can stand by “only AI isn’t art” as long as you want. Standing by a bad argument does not improve it. You are not defending craft. You are defending a boundary you did not have to earn and do not understand well enough to draw. You are uninformed about the medium you are attacking, wrong about the history of the medium you are standing on, and recycling a slogan you insisted didn’t exist.