The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
a) the panic is entirely misguided and based on two wrong assumptions. The first is that textual input and treating the model as a function (command in -> result out) are sufficient for anything. No, this is a fundamentally deficient way to give artistic directions, which is further handicapped by primitive models and weak compute. Text alone is a toy; the field will just become more and more complex and technically involved, just like 3D CGI did, because if you don't use every trick available, you're missing out. The second wrong assumption is that it's going to replace anyone, instead of making many people re-learn a new tool and produce what was previously unfeasible due to the amount of mechanistic work involved. This second assumption stems from the fundamental misunderstanding of the value artists provide, which is conceptualization, even in a seemingly routine job.
b) the panic is entirely blown out of proportion by the social media. Most people have neither time nor desire to actually dive into this tech and find out what works and what doesn't. They just believe that a magical machine steals their works to replace them, because that's what everyone reposts on Twitter endlessly.
If artists I employ want to incorporate this stuff into their workflow, that sounds great. They can get more done. There won't be less artists on payroll, just more and better art will be produced. I don't even think it is at the point of incorporating it into a workflow yet though, so this really seems like a nothing burger to me.
At least github copilot is useful. This stuff is really not useful in a professional context, and the idea that it is going to take artists jobs really doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, if there aren't any artists then who exactly do I have that is using these AI tools to make new designs? If you think the answer to that is just some intern, then you really don't know what you're talking about.
Yes, artists can also utilize AI as a photoshop filter, and some artists have started using it to fill in backgrounds in drawings, etc. Inpainting can also be used to do unimportant textures for 3d models. But that doesn't mean that AI art is no threat to artists' livelihoods, especially for scenarios like "I need a dozen illustrations to go with these articles" where quality isn't so important to the commissioner that they are willing to spend an extra few hundred bucks instead of spending 15 minutes in midjourney or stable diffusion.
As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work without permission or compensation, they will continue to improve in output quality and muscle the actual artists out of work.
Take for example video games. They distracted many people from movies, but also created a huge new field, hungry for talents. Or another one, quite a few genres calcified into distinctive boring styles over the years (see anything related to manga/anime as an example) simply because those styles require less mechanical work and are cheaper to produce. They could use a deep refresh. This tech will also lead to novel applications, created by those who embraced it and are willing to learn the increasingly complex toolset. That's what been happening the last several decades, which have seen several tech revolutions.
>As long as these networks continue being trained on artists' work
This misses the point. The real power of those things is not in the collection of styles baked into it. It's in the ability to learn new stuff. Finetuning and style transfer is what all the wizards do. Construct your own visual style by hand, make it produce more of that. And that's not just about static 2D images; neither do 2D illustrators represent all artists in the broad sense. Everyone who types "blah blah in the style of Ilya Kuvshinov" or is using img2img or whatever is just missing out, because the same stuff is going to be everywhere real soon.