I mean, my whole comment is a prediction of the future, so that's water under the bridge. Maybe you're right and this is the start of the apocalypse for digital artists, but it feels more like photoshop in 1990 to me -- and people were saying the same stuff back then.
> 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.
Pay 10 non skilled artist to do some bad job and we will complain about 10 bad logos. Now, for a fraction of the price, pay 10000 AI generated low quality logos and flood the market with them. Market expectations will go lower and suddenly your AI will be on par with the artists...
(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)...
What happens when the AI takes the low end of the market is that the people who catered to the low end now have to try to compete more in the mid-to-high end. The mid end facing increased competition has to try to move up to the high end. So while AI may not be able to compete directly with the high end it will erode the negotiating power and thus the earning potential of the high end.
Or graphic design, or video editing, or audio mastering, or...every new tool has come with a bunch of people saying things like "what will happen to the linotype operators!?"
I sort of hate this line of argument, but it also has been manifestly true of the past, and rhymes with the present.
> 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.