Let me start by prefacing this, I do not like Generative AI in the art space, art is made for humans, by humans, when you see a good piece, you know the person suffered, he spent tens of thousands of hours practicing his craft, went through countless failures and still pushed forward, he grew and sculpted his style, it evolved throughout the years, and that's makes it human. AI on the other just steals real work, and then people abuse it and commodifies it, leading to some people seeing the style as "it's AI", who then might see the actual real artist and call his stuff AI too, it might even, like me, ruin some artists style, because now it's associated with AI, although I do know that an artist is more than just the style, but the content and the message also, don't get me wrong.
I wouldn't care if tomorrow AI gen disappeared, it wouldn't change anything but show that some people truly are not artists, but more like commissioners, asking an artist (the AI model) to make a piece, although this time its in 5 seconds, lesser in quality because you only have the style, but not the soul.
I do believe that it could, in a perfect world, be used as an actual tool, but as it is now, most people aren't, its their main thing, a tool is meant to be something that helps you, not does everything. You don't tell a drill where to make holes and it does it for you, you have to bring it, use your strength and be precise, it makes the hole faster than if you used a hand drill, another tool, just like CSP,krita, the brushes and etc are tools, their sole goal is to make the users experience better and easier, it doesn't magically do everything 98% of the work for you.
There's also the obvious side of Copyright infringement, if everyone can make pieces that looks identical to an artist, then what is the point to even start to learn to draw? if you know that when you get good enough, someone will press a couple of buttons, train a LoRA/model on your, and then bam you're useless, what's the point? Not to be too cringe, but quoting Syndrome from The Incredibles : When everybody is Super, no one will be. Obviously the cream of the crop of the artists will stand on their own, but what about those under?
Art is meant to be shared, looked at by other people, if a machine can churn specific pieces to each and every person depending on their personal taste, where's the art in that? no one else would admire anothers generated work, they would be too specific. Anyways, im getting lost writing this, hopefully it comes off well and understandable, I have trouble sometimes with this.