In practice it's really not that difficult of a question. "Artists" have a portfolio of work and are usually (but not always) engaged with organizations related

In practice it's really not that difficult of a question. "Artists" have a portfolio of work and are usually (but not always) engaged with organizations related to the arts: galleries, nonprofits, etc. If you show up and say, "this random obscure software thing I'm doing is art," without any effort at portraying yourself as an artist, working in the arts, writing about your work, showing it in galleries or online, etc., then no, you probably aren't going to get funding. But you'd have to be pretty clueless about the entire process to think this is viable in the first place. These organizations are funding people that are socially "artists", and are not interested in some abstract debate about the meaning of art and then funding people that fit that definition. There are plenty of people doing obscure software-related things (usually described as digital art) that are absolutely considered artists for programs like this. But they are deliberately engaged with the process, so the supposed problem alluded to here doesn't really exist in practice.