Artist is everyone who creates copyrighted works. You, me, everyone with a camera. Everyone with a guitar who records. Digital art or paintbrushes, lines of code or lines in the next harry potter novel, it is legally all the same. The artist/creator gets total copyright, then either licenses those rights away or sells copies.

I even have rights over that pervious paragraph. It aint worth much but if someone wanted to monitize it i would have rights i could assert.