When was making living through art guaranteed? Society has mocked artists for centuries.
Let them make art and give them a UBI.
AI will replace programmers too; if a user can ask a future AI to organize their machines state into an arbitrary video game, photorealistic movie, generate reports from sources abc, weighing for xyz on a bar chart; only the AI code base (whatever boot strapping and runtime it needs) becomes necessary.
Why would I ask an AI that can produce the end result to produce code? Code is just minimized ideal machine state.
You’re correct; there is a lot of empathy lacking in our culture, but it’s not just when it comes to art.