There are novel artists using Stable Diffusion or Firefly as a photoshop-like-tool. Not txt2img, but stuff like inpainting, controlnet, contextual modification, LORAs trained on their own portfolio and such.

They are obscure for the same reason most artists are obscure.

But most "AI artists" you are talking about are would-be consumers looking for something specific, not creators looking to pull something novel out of their head.