We have already learned that the main claim made by an author is called the author's thesis. But what exactly is a claim, anyway?
In academics, any time anyone makes a statement about anything, asserting some kind of truth about that thing, or stating that they know anything at all to be true, we call this a claim.
We do this to explicitly acknowledge just how difficult it is to obtain truth in this world. No matter how strongly we feel about something, it is, ultimately doubtful, that we would have the truth. We merely claim to have the truth. It is similar when it comes to knowledge - just what knowledge is is extremely difficult to define, and as counter-intuitive as it might sound, we do not have an undisputable theory, or even definition of the term. We do not know. We claim to know.
Good authors structure their claims so that accepting them will lead their audience to accept their main claim, or thesis. They convince their audience to accept their claims by providing compelling evidence to support those claims. They give reasons to accept their evidence, and reasons to accept their claims. This chain of persuasion is called a line of reasoning.
You should absorb these academic terms into your vocabulary, and apply them to the readings you encounter. The more you practice, the easier it will become to quickly identify an author's line of reasoning. This skill is of great importance, because once you have mastered this, you can apprehend readings quickly, and powerfully.
In this article, popular author Ted Chiang makes a strong claim that the creations of A.I. aren't worthy of being called art. He reinforces this overall claim (his thesis) with further claims, and, crucially, evidence that supports those claims. Pay attention also to how he qualifies his claims, explaining how the use of A.I. could be considered an art in some cases, and the admission that he cannot account for new developments in the far future. These serve to strengthen his claims about the inability for our current forms of A.I. to produce anything that we can meaningfully refer to as art.