It's entirely theoretical, but I don't think artists are going anywhere, at least in the US (surprisingly). There's been a case of copyright being refused because the AI work did not contain human authorship. https://twitter.com/franklingraves/status/1628468012515827718/photo/2
What I think this means is that there will always be an artist involved somewhere in the process. But on a moral case, I don't think AI has a future for bulk- asset creation. The usage of their data sets is often, if not always, breaching both the licensing and copyright protections inherent of any work in the US (or part of their public release). The scale of these data sets make getting ethical consent of all creators involved functionally impossible, especially as many works will be included from (for example) dead, or inactive accounts that can't be contacted. So it's going to be really hard to use this current tech in a legal, commercially viable, and reasonably ethical way.
One other thing is that eventually, AI Data Sets are going to include a bunch of AI work that's been automatically scraped from the internet. I wrote a twitter thread on the issues I think will come with that. That's a purely technical issue that I think means that future AI will be more time-consuming to make, and thus, more expensive and less cost-effective.
Here's what I think is going to happen instead:
Artists are going to start using AI as reference to create faster, better art. It'll become an efficiency tool, a double-edged tool that can help as much as it hinders depending on its use. One thing that could be really difficult but would be ethical, legal, and cheap would be artists creating their own private AI based on their own work. A tool they could use to provide concept sketches and blocking, skipping over a lengthy requirement for their work. That's what I personally hope happens. I think artists should retain ownership of their own work.
