All in all, it feels like AI is a danger for people at the bottom of the profession hierarchy, but will elevate people at the top, whose work cannot be replaced. In other words, people who are more akin to be considered "artisans" rather than artists, who will take a prompt and simply clean it.
I am an artist who is in a place where she gets paid decently to draw whatever the heck she feels like, with little regard for commercial viability.
The jobs you're dismissing as mere "artisans" are the ones where I was able to be in a place where I could spend most of my waking hours honing my drawing skills and still pay my rent. Every time you draw a thing, you get a little better at drawing that thing, and a little better at drawing in general. This is how you master your craft. If you're part of a studio then even better: there's older artists above you, and tons of opportunities for them to critique your work and open your eyes to the major flaws in it you can't see yet. If AI art fills all those niches for expanding on someone else's prompts, budding pros will find it a lot harder to get to the point where this virtuous circle of being paid to practice their craft gets started.
In particular, drawing has something like the 20/80 rule, where all the creative input is in the first 20% and the rest is 'rendering', a very mechanical task which you can mostly do with your brain turned off.
This really depends on your process. A big part of becoming a pro, in my experience, was finding ways to make the boring parts happen a lot faster, and giving myself more opportunities to do the fun parts at every stage of the piece. That said there's also a pleasure to be found in putting on some good music, turning your brain off, and rendering the heck out of something! It's that much-coveted "flow state" people love to talk about.
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I am an artist who is in a place where she gets paid decently to draw whatever the heck she feels like, with little regard for commercial viability.
The jobs you're dismissing as mere "artisans" are the ones where I was able to be in a place where I could spend most of my waking hours honing my drawing skills and still pay my rent. Every time you draw a thing, you get a little better at drawing that thing, and a little better at drawing in general. This is how you master your craft. If you're part of a studio then even better: there's older artists above you, and tons of opportunities for them to critique your work and open your eyes to the major flaws in it you can't see yet. If AI art fills all those niches for expanding on someone else's prompts, budding pros will find it a lot harder to get to the point where this virtuous circle of being paid to practice their craft gets started.
This really depends on your process. A big part of becoming a pro, in my experience, was finding ways to make the boring parts happen a lot faster, and giving myself more opportunities to do the fun parts at every stage of the piece. That said there's also a pleasure to be found in putting on some good music, turning your brain off, and rendering the heck out of something! It's that much-coveted "flow state" people love to talk about.