I don't disagree that it's still interesting (if a bit boring after the first few frames of an animated representation of the progress). But a piece of art created by a few dozen people with machines, when compared to the expectation that a piece of art was created by a couple hundred thousand people by hand; well, it just doesn't have the same impact.

But the machines were only built and deployed as a reaction to human energies? If there were no people participating as they were, then no one would have gone to the efforts to build and run the bots. I feel your comment seems to gloss over how important the human factor was to bringing the more "mechanical" part into existence :)

EDIT: speaking of which, I wonder if reddit could use some of the data from this to detect sockpuppet network on reddit... I imagine communities of a certain type might have engaged (or not) with this phenomenon in a very different way than others

It definitely does, viewing it as "collaborative art" when really it's just a bunch of people running bots to smash other people's shit turns it from "art" to a popularity contest of standard internet practice pretty fast.