Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.
Automation often comes at a considerable social expense. Industrialization has been an incredibly violent social transformation in every instance it occurred, even when implemented under the auspices of socialist states. On the other end of it, we got an abundance of consumer goods, previously inconceivable technological and scientific breakthroughs, but this didn't come through anything resembling a smooth crescendo of enlightenment or progress.
Tools on their own are just tools. Whether it is a steam powered loom or a machine learning algorithm, the function doesn't matter. What matters (as you just edited in 😉) is who controls it and what it is being used for. At the present moment, these tools are overwhelmingly dominated by the Silicon Valley giants. The algorithms themselves may be open source, but the raw computational power and massive datasets needed to put them into practical use lie in private hands. This technology strengthens firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon and the state tremendously, while only reaching the level of a novelty for average people with limited computational resources. For this reason, we should be incredibly cautious.
But caution does not mean ignorance. This technology will continue to be developed whether we like it or not. Think about guns. Guns are among the worst things ever invented in human history, but world peace will not be brought about by burying our heads in the sand and wishing they went away. We need to develop an intimate understanding of this technology so we can be prepared both to combat it, and to employ it in the struggle for liberation.
I legitimately don't think this will cause all artists to be phased out at this point. Right now it is rare that it generates anything remarkable without digital alterations and a ton of input by the user, which in itself would be an art process. Stable Diffusion was posted here by someone at some point and I think thats the tech to be keeping an eye on, its open source and free, DALLE is all about the capitalists trying to control the tech for profit. Sort of like how Microsoft coopted a lot of open source tech and capitalized on it. I think the more realistic thing is it will make collaging easier as well as speeding up the workflow of current professional artists, which may actually allow them to make more money.
I doubt it'll end up killing anyone, as most of the historical instances of violence from technological advancement are associated with medicine and food supply chains.