What is Art for anyway?
Artists have always cultivated a mystique. What they were doing had a transcendent purpose and wasn't merely a vulgar commodity. But let AI potentially disrupt the economic rents and democratize the joy of visual creation? Boom, they're industrial labor ready to picket.
Maybe AI is bad if art is construed strictly as an economic activity, but if there really is a joy to it, a kind of transcendence, then opening that up to everyone might be worth what it’s going to do to the value of art as labor.
The universe has to have a sense of humor: it is way too often precisely the lie at the heart of someone's pretensions by which they are later crucified.