The main thing people are worried about is the fact that food costs money and you need to eat in order to live. People are afraid that their illustration jobs are at risk because of AI illustrations being _good enough_.
The illustrator from the article is probably drawing in Procreate with an Ipad. Probably doing her promotion on social media and doing business with her clients remotely. All of those are recent technological advancements that appeared in her lifetime and completely outperformed the previous way to do commercial illustration. Illustrators that worked before that had to learn those new ways, or lose their jobs. This happened dozens of time in history. Now is the turn for current illustrators to adapt.
And until someone does any job for some amount of money, a beginner can start his career by doing the same job for less money. This will still be the case no matter what technology comes next.
Now there are a lot less people playing live music.
There is no fundamental change. Only an incremental one.
Even if AI-generated imagery takes over the market for “drawings in the style of someone else”, these AIs will still need to be trained and operated by human beings. It will not bring the cost to zero, it will just lower it — which already happens continuously in all markets due to human ingenuity.
Are you happy for me to feed that in to an AI generated feed and and generate logo's based off your illustrations, post them online to be sold? How would you feel? How would you adapt from that?
I did the same thing to get into the logo industry. In the process of learning I've analysed hundreds of logos made by other artists. I've tried hard to understand how they work, copy the best practices and styles and do the my best effort so my logos could be as good. I've trained on this dataset and got to be successful enough to become a part of it.
I don't have a moral problem with AI doing the same. It will probably be hard to compete with it, but for now I manage. If I won't be able to compete anymore - I will adapt and apply my skills elsewhere.
Every job being automated requires its own "we're unique" pitch to get any pity points.
Many newsletters/newspapers of bygone era had an artist/doodler to do little sketches which got replaced by clipart in many cases.
If artists could simply ask for food and be given it from the overflowing cornucopia, then yes, this wouldn't matter and in fact would be a net benefit.
Unfortunately though, artists must sell their art to get money, then exchange that money for food. Now, if a robot produces free art that's almost as good, most of those buyers won't pay those artists anymore, and the artists will starve (or stop being artists).
I do believe that job automation will quickly eliminate scarcity for basic life necessities, while also displacing more and more jobs in our economy, and that therefore UBI or some equivalent will be imminently necessary - but that's a much larger topic
Most of us live in cities, and go to the store to buy food. We have specialized in being good at making images, which we trade for money, which we can trade for other goods and services such as "food" or "entertainment" or "rent". Some of us are doing well enough to have room for a garden, and the time to tend it. This is by no means the majority.
How many of your peers would know one end of a modern combine harvester from the other? Probably very few, if you live in the city.