It's almost like the peak form of being a consumer. All you have to do is express your desire in a sophisticated (maybe even not sophisticated?) way, and you can easily pay a device to fulfill it on the cheap.
This 100%. I'm amazed that people somehow are unable to distinguish between the craftsmanship of a painting, and writing a prompt that an external system uses to paint.
What I always emphasize is that if the input and output are sufficiently divergent then your sense of accomplishment at the resulting creation should be proportionally diminished. But what do I know? People use ChatGPT to write a story and midjourney to illustrate it, then make a viral post with the caption "I just wrote a book in under 24 hours."
Have you ever told someone you code and they say "I have an idea for an app!", proceeding to explain in like one sentence the vague idea of an app? Would you call that person a creative? An engineer? An inventor? An entrepreneur? Do you really ever feel that they added any value to you? Do you not find them incredibly naïve? If you did create the app, do you feel like they did 90% of the work of creating this app, because the rest of the process is that meaningless? If you created it from their one line prompt of their idea, would you agree with the concept that the final result was actually all a direct expression of their idea?
Machines cannot express, as far as I know. They're sophisticated tools but still tools.
If someone feels these tools help them express what they want, if they are satisfied, I would call that a form of self-expression. I mean, who am I to deny them that feeling?
