I've seen intense rage and despair for even top tier 2D artists, Japanese, Chinese, Western all alike. Like top of industry, massive fanbase, they all understand there is no sugarcoating it anymore.

AI improved from 5-year-old scribble to crushing 90% of artists in technical execution within 9 months. So they had no time to process it at all, and had to cope with shock and denial.

Now virtually all traditional 2d artist jobs are on the chopping block, its just inertia keeping them employed for another year or two. At top Chinese game studios like Tencent and Mihoyo, they are already intensely experimenting with AI workflows. And many indie game studios are pretty much already using AI for most concept art.

Artist jobs won't disappear, but they'll become hybrids of 3d modelling, SD prompting, python scripting, model training, and photoshopping. For many artists this means the workflows they spent decades honing is now gone. Also, most of them love drawing, so art jobs that don't involve drawing are despairing to them.

Those who fare best, are those who don't care much about drawing, but storytelling (Say Mangaka), they will be freed from drawing 14 hours a day, and cut their workloads in half.

Note, I think artist jobs will increase and pay better. The true industries in threat are non-virtual entertainment, such as tourism, concerts. They'll be competing with AI augmented artists that can produce awe-inspiring works in weeks not years.

Universal World's hogwarts parks are admirable. But they'll soon be competing against fully realized hogwarts (already modelled in Hogwarts legacy, without AI), that are then filled with fully responsive AIs whom you can actually talk to (Courtesy of GPT5,6,7).

AI will create massive value, but it'll also bring massive, extremely uncomfortable dislocations. Better try to adapt AI as soon as possible, and analyze how your role will transform.

Could you list some examples of companies that have laid off their art departments to use DALL-E/SD/etc?

People do write code for money (mostly)

See the difference? How would you feel if developers earned as much as artists do?

There is no financial incentive to replace paid artists. There is an enormous financial incentive to reduce software development headcount.

Older folks will remember when the solution to this was to outsource development to low-cost regions like South American or Southeast Asia. You can ask ChatGPT how that went.

Let's get at least one company, at least one, replacing its graphic design department with DALL-E, or its development team with GPT, before calling an entire profession obsolete.

Come back in ten years and tell me that there was no threat.

Also, for anyone living under a rock, the 'AI art style' --- by which you probably mean MidJourney 3 style --- has been steadily disappearing across MJ 4 and 5.

So, yes, actually, artists may now be 'obsolete', at least in the sense of 'viable form of capitalism for an adult North American to pursue as a profession'.

Circumstances for artists were already the worst they'd ever been, in real terms, even before this. Going forward, 'graphic designer', like 'music engineer', is going to be five people with real talent and 20,000 cool kids with trust funds. Everyone else fights for a job at Wal-Mart.

Best queue for your shift, the pinnies that fit well always get grabbed first