I think AI replacing artists is going to be a good thing in the long run.
Right now, if you want custom artwork made without the use of AI you have to either criminally underpay an artist on Fiverr or pay an artist hundreds of dollars to make one piece which you may not like.
I think the cat is out of the bag on AI generated art pieces and there’s no way to put it back in, and so future artists will use a combination of their actual art skills and their ability to work with an AI system to create entirely new and currently nearly impossible art pieces, and there is an entire field of unexplored possibilities waiting to be tapped by Future artists.
AI can’t make new art.
All it can do is repurpose pieces of art other people have made, just like Auto-Tune can make you sing on pitch but it can’t make you a good singer.
I think you’re in the ballpark of the truth OP. Art and all forms of human creativity come from two sources, experience and connectivity. Nothing man has ever created came from a vacuum. We start observing and remembering the world from birth, and once we are old enough we begin to connect these experiences together with lateral thinking.
MLLM models just taking training data (experience) and connect it together in potentially new ways (lateral thinking). A close approximation of human creativity. Which will eventually become identical and then surpass any human capability.
Once we begin to understand that our human brains are not unique we will then be able to extend our creativity in ways that will make modern art seem archaic.
People need to stop being of afraid of what is new, despite what your lizard brain is telling you. Start accepting that AI is step in human evolution that will allow us to live in a world we have not yet imagined… or it will kill us all.