“Yes, the 7th grader who submitted this poster calls it the ‘Mona Lisa’. Doesn’t have anything to do with the state fair, but I swear this one belongs in a museum! Honorable Mention for sure!”

Not to mention that any Ai-entrant piece could be duplicated by any other entrant

With great difficulty, maybe. You'd need the exact model, prompt, seed, and hardware, and even then I believe there is some nondeterminism.

Probably they figured that the risk of any of that stuff causing actual problems was less than the headache of publicly disqualifying an already-announced winner who has a colorable argument that she didn't break any rules.

Whether is not copyrightable is not relevant to this. The parent poster's point is just as salient. The creator, not the sumbitter needs to meet the criteria in question. A clanker isn't a resident of Ohio.

Oil paint would be a bit more controversial if it painted the picture all by itself…

Exactly. This was ultimately the work of a human who used AI to create something.

You can't speak to oil paint in English and get a picture.

Until recently, the only such a "tool" used to be a human being.

There's no creativity or skill in handing something off to a generative model. At best, it's analogous to commissioning a work (as another poster said). It's not remotely like using a tool to create art.

You can't drop ship creativity and still take credit for it.

Grubhub is also a tool. If you order a pizza, you didn't make a pizza "just using a different tool"

Nope. At best, they are like commissioning work from a computer. When you commission a piece, especially as an art director, you often have lengthy conversations, exchange sketches, do multiple iterations, and have pretty fine-grained control over much of the final outcome. Art direction is a fundamentally creative process. But an art director would never, ever take credit for the piece. Why? They understand that so much of that artist’s voice, granular artistic perspective, and so much more are the building blocks of the piece. Image generators could provide reference material, make images for mood boards, and all sorts of other things useful in the artistic process, but the prompter is absolutely not making art.