[DennisP]

The Oxford English dictionary's first definition for the word "artificial" is "made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural."

"Made by humans" is a useful definition of "artificial," because regardless of how we feel about human superiority, in practice we often want to distinguish between things that are made by humans, and things that aren't. If we didn't use the word "artificial" for that, we'd come up with another convenient adjective meaning the same thing (and then probably have semantic arguments over that one).

[feet]

Artificial != unnatural

[DennisP]

OED's first definition for "natural" is "existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind."

And one of their definitions for "unnatural" is "not existing in nature; artificial."