> And it's not low-quality work, it's just the same or better work, done much more efficiently, and without the need of some previously-used products
Oh, I highly doubt this. Since I use ChatGPT for generating images quite often. There's no chance in hell they are doing consistent high-quality work in ChatGPT 90% of the time. Or your (and their) definition of high quality work is far from a common definition.
This is especially true in the past few months when OpenAI removed any way to directly prompt their image generator. So ChatGPT is often stuck in the same generator seed, the generator never gets the full prompt, regenerates images (inconsistently), messes up details, ignores input (because the model never generates the prompt to the image generating model correctly) etc. etc.
Good enough to generate a restaurant slop-menu or a quick TTRPG image. Consistent high quality? Lol.