The issue isn’t the final, individual art pieces, it’s the scale. An AI can produce sub-par art quickly enough to threaten the livelyhood of artists, especially now that there is far too much art for anyone to consume and appreciate. AI art can win attention via spam, drowning out human artists.

This is literally what people said about photography.

And they were right, painting became less prolific as photography became available to the masses. People generally don’t get their portrait painted.

But people also generally don’t go to photo studios to have their picture taken, either, and those used to be in every shopping mall. But now we all have camera phones that adjust lighting and color and focus for us, and we can send a sufficiently decent picture off to be printed and mailed back to us. For those who want it done professionally that option is available and will be higher quality, just like portrait painting is still available, but technology has shrunk those client pools.

Technology always changes job markets. Generative AI will, just as others have done. People will lose careers they thought were stable, and it will be awful, but this isn’t anything unique to generative AI.

The only constant is that things change.