Plus there are many use cases where it would be nice to have professionally made, unique art, but the costs of creating it would simply be too high.

For example, a group of friends sitting around playing D&D, would not likely commission custom artwork for each of their characters. With tools like stable diffusion, you could have a set of several images of each character, as well as for NPCs, landmarks, runes and so on, all in an afternoons work, with some knowledge of the tech.

Yes! AI-generated content has to work ok-ish to be useful.

I can imagine a game where depending on your level, mastery or expertise. You could create AI-generated gear system where depending on your stats you could get different styles.

> not everyone is good at art, but they know exactly what they want,

This is pretty much like saying "not everyone is good at programming, but they know exactly what they want". Then consider all the debate about agile processes and amount of ink spilled over how to get your customers to figure out what they want from your code...

Honestly, as much as I think AI art is deeply unfair to artists who unwillingly contributed its learning material and are getting replaced by "in the style of ..." prompts, I can see how just deferring a commercial customer to AI can be a blessing. Let the machine deal with "this looks fine and it fits the material I gave you, but I imagined it differently. Can you redo it by tomorrow?"

I worked in an agency. The way pretty much all creative process in any large company works is that the stakeholder (such as a brand manager) signs off on a broad vision for a creative campaign. The agency then uses its creative talent to create the actual collateral. Most of the times, the stakeholder will only be asked to look at (or want to look at) major campaign collateral (such as a superbowl ad).

All the stuff that AI is automating currently is too mundane and cheap to involve a decision maker. No brand manager is spending time signing off on 1 of 12 product images out of 2000 SKUs on their site.

My point is: the business use case for AI generated art is really overblown. Small businesses definitely interact with creative tools directly, and it will be of great help to them. But in any business of any significant size, the creative process is offloaded to the “creative types” and the only input decision makers will have is to tell them what something should look like. At no point will they actually sit down and try to use creative tools to create stuff.