Why would capitalists pay 5 people $35000 per year ($175k total) to produce a couple dozen sketches per day at best, when they can pay one person $60k-$80k per year to make hundreds of finished works. AI works have the speed of being a punch-press operator with the fine-tuning of a CNC-miller. We haven’t really seen custom work of this scale before. I think it will be a preview into what physical labor will look like with cheap modular robotics vs current methods based on machine operation and support crews.

For example: go look at the thread at Sigmarxism i took that screen from, and look at what exactly OP of that thread posted. Point is, he did specified it has to be 40k imperial propaganda and AI was completely unable to create anything looking even remotely like this. And for what i know probably thousands hours were put into getting that (EDIT: not specifically that thread naturally, but overall attempts of getting AI to create anything really 40k). Current AI is completely incapable of making it too specific, it would need tons of work. Same with anything other too specific, we are posting Marx and Stalin created by AI all the time here but you won't see even one decent Lenin (well i got one good but anime Lenin and that's it) or nothing even remotely resembling H&S. That means if they want to get heavily into AI that gruntwork would increase probably way more than the current art comissioning. Who knows in the future though.

I will certainly watch it since it's interesting and we are right now at the moment of birth of technology that can potentially transform quite much, but it's in it infancy and it can go many different ways. Though i don't predict either the best one or the worst one happening.

But I think in this case the people doing the cheap dataset training won’t necessarily need to be artists

It was the same in manufacturing, skilled artisans were replaced by machine operators. It don't mean that machine operators don't need skill too, just a different one. Again we can't stop this, and neither i do think we should stop this. And continuing the comparison, the people i talk about would be not entirely unlike the guilders.

The reason smalltime artists get upset about AI art is because it takes away the only thing they can offer, which is the skill to create something a buyer wants. I would imagine more prolific artists are upset about it because AI will increase competition

Definitely, again we will see the same phenomenon Marx described, people squeezing themselves to compete with machine and ultimately losing, becoming proletarians in the process.

until only the most recognized brands survive, so a lot can see themselves being cut out of the equation and having all their customers go to people who are already millionaires.

Somehow i don't see people buying art for 50 bucks being able to afford those established brands, not to mention millionaires. More like they will just do it themselves. What you probably didn't missed if you looked at the mentioned Deviantart, is how the overal amount of productive accounts rise rapidly, even though they produce AI pics.

person who owns the tool has all the power (and rest of the paragraph).

Again, similar as in the other automation cases, but since it's digital thing there would probably always be alternatives, also i don't think humans will en masse lost the drawing ability or something. And as i wrote them, it's not AI they hate, it's capitalism, and they downvoted even such a well established 150 years marxist thought, which precisely prompted me to call the sub "sigliberalism" and them the petty bourgies, even if just for their mentality.