I agree. It is more than just "lost jobs", like artist impressionists, court room sketch artists, etc. it is a complete dystopia and it doesn't help artists at all, but displaces them. At least the value of actual paintings will be more valuable that the abundance of this highly generated digital rubbish.
So given that the technologists have so-called 'democratized' and cheapened digital art, I really can't wait until we get an open-source version of Copilot AI that would create full programs, apps, full stack websites with no-code so that we would be seeing very cheap Co-pilot AI shops in the south east of the world generating software that effectively eliminates the need for a senior full stack engineer.
Easy cheap business solution for the majority of engineering managers on a tight budget who know they need to offshore tech jobs without the need for any skill as it is offloaded to cheap Copilot prompters.
So we will have no problems with that and be happy with that dystopia. Wouldn't we?
Being an artist isn't really being able to draw well, it is able to do a lot more than that in harmony, and so I believe these tools will just get incorporated and some new artists will appear and older artists will adapt.
My only worry with this, and it's not something that I see being pointed out too much. Is that due to these models being able to produce art from previous art they've seen we might find it difficult to come up with new novel styles. But then again, this might precisely be a new kind of avenue for human artist expression.
But I think society will find a way. Who knows, maybe we'll all work less and enjoy life more? One can hope.
This is more like the literacy/printing press transition.
Used to be, people had to learn to memorize a lifetime of stories and lore. Now nobody learns to make a memory palace or form a mnemonic couplet. Why would you bother? You just write things down.
Today, people learn to draw. In a generation, why would you bother?
There will still be specialist jobs for people generating images, but instead of learning to make them up, the specialists will be very good at picking them, suggesting them, consuming them.
Humans will be the managers and the editors, not the creators.
The same thing will happen to other arts. First (and very easily) to music. Eventually, perhaps, to writing and whole movies...
The only thing stopping that is that the models can't maintain a reality between frames. They can't make an arc. It's all dreamlike.
If we find a way to nail object persistence it will be a singularity-level event. The moment you can say "make another version of this movie, but I want Edgar to be more sarcastic and Lisa should break up with him in the second act" we will close the feedback loop.
It's a lot bigger than "lost jobs".