I wholeheartedly believe this too. There's something so amazing about the feeling of creating things with your own hands and seeing what the rest of the world says about it. But the moment you rely on this to literally not starve, any unfairly advantaged competition becomes that much more dangerous.

Yes, indeed. And, in fact, it would probably make them happier if the bullshit commercial art that's bereft of meaning - a subset of commercial art, to be clear - was no longer something they had to concern themselves with in order to pay the bills.

If they - and the rest of us - could be granted the dignity of a good and comfortable life while perusing projects that were personally fulfilling, then there'd be little issue. But instead, their work is being used not only to line the pockets of investors and a handful of tech enthusiasts with the right connections (generative machine learning models aren't that hard for anyone with some programming skills and basic linear algebra to develop, the magic is in the money), but to directly undercut their paid work. And that's just not going to fly.

We have an art director at the corp I work for who is basically automated out of a job now. She is near retired and on good terms with the CEO so they will probably let her wrap up and not replace her.

Of course she still hasn't figured out how to use the new label maker, update the website, or use AI art generation so that has fallen to the rest of us.

Counter argument to pose, would be that a skilled artist with AI is now a faster producing artist than without - presumably (at least at the current tech), this combo pair up is best of both worlds. Artist can create art but still retains creative freedom and the talent of guiding AI prompts in specific directions a project may call for that a non-artist with an AI would struggle with.