In a world where Stable Diffusion wins the copyright lawsuits, I don't think "artist" would cease to be a profession. Rather, I think the equilibrium would be artists using Stable Diffusion as a tool to automate the labor-intensive parts of making art (putting the brush strokes on the page) while the human artist provides high-level creative direction.

This would be bad for present-day artists who've invested their lives in developing the skills of putting brush strokes on the page; those skills would become worthless. But the flip side is that Stable Diffusion lets anyone make art easily, generating whatever image they can dream up, without having to spend years developing the skills first.

So even though Stable Diffusion is bad for present-day _artists_, I suspect it's actually good for _art_ in the long term. "Anyone can easily create an endless supply of art, based on any idea they can dream up" seems like a good thing to me.

I think you're right. However an implied yet crucial belief is that the loss of manual artists (vs creative directors) will not rob us of potential advances in art.

Put another way, it is the belief that the 2020s are the peak of manual human art.

Imagine if we'd felt that way a thousand years ago, or even a hundred. Is it worth being wrong?

I agree it makes it less likely that people will create novel manual art techniques. By analogy -- when cameras were invented, artists stopped focusing as much on realism. But I don't think that was any great loss. Also, there are some artists today who still make photorealistic paintings, despite the existence of cameras; so I don't think Stable Diffusion will make it impossible to have advances in manual art techniques.

Also, I think we have to weigh that tradeoff against all the new things that will be created if art becomes accessible to 100x as many people. On net, I think Stable Diffusion opens many more doors for art than it closes.