> It's already wholesale-replacing many digital artists and editorial illustrators
I think you're going to need to cite some data on a claim like that. Maybe it's replacing the fiverr end of the market? It's certainly much harder to justify paying someone to generate a (bad) logo or graphic when a diffusion model can do the same thing, but there's no way that a model, today, can replace a skilled artist. Or said differently: a skilled artist, combined with a good AI model, is vastly more productive than an unskilled artist with the same model.
I sort of hate this line of argument, but it also has been manifestly true of the past, and rhymes with the present.
(in case you think the market will not behave like that, just have a look at how we produce low quality food and how many people are perfectly fine with that)...
I'd refrain from making any such statements about the future; the pace of change makes it hard to see the horizon beyond a few years, especially relative to the span of a career. It's already wholesale-replacing many digital artists and editorial illustrators, and while it's still early, there's a clear push starting in the cinematography direction. (I fully agree with the rest of your comment, and it's strange how much diffusion models seem to be overlooked relative to LLMs when people think about AI progress these days.)