Well, they wouldn't claim to assemble it. It's clear to me these people using AI so heavily don't have an authorship role at all, but a publishing one.

It's not so clear to me. AI is just a tool you use like any other.

In that case are publishers also authors when the artists and writers are (contracted) tools like any other?

This is just as rehash of the debate around authorship for prompting a single image. If you had typed the same prompt on Google and picked a picture, or hired an artist with that prompt, you wouldn't claim to be the artist. Therefore you're having a different role than that in the process, ML model or not: publisher, producer, whatever.

The sooner these people come to terms with it, the better, so they can promote themselves for the skills they actually have (lackluster as I find them) and leave actual authors to carve their own niches among the incoming flood of generated content.

What? People are not tools, machine are. Is this so hard?

I can't imagine anything is clear to you.

You're a bottleneck to understanding.