They matter but not under the current system. Artists are a rarely paid profession, and there are professional artists out there but there’s now a huge amount of people that will never contact an artist for work that used to only be human powered. It’s not personal for me. I understand that desire to resist the inevitable but it’s here now.

For what it’s worth I never use midjourney or dalle or any of the commercial closed systems that steal from artists but I know I can’t stop the masses from going there and inputting “give me pretty picture in style x”