The “circle of life” except that it kills the artists’ careers rather than creating new ones.

It will kill all the ones that are stuck on old technology. Those that can make the best use of AI will prevail, at least for a little while, until AI replaces the whole media distribution chain and we’ll just have our own personal Holodeck with whatever content we want, generated on demand.

However efficient AI may be at replicating the work of artists, the same could be said of a photocopier

It’s not copying existing works and never did. Even if you explicitly instruct it to copy something existing, it will create its own original spin on the topic. It’s really no different than any artist working on commission.

Don’t forget that the kind of AI we have doesn’t do anything by itself.

You are free to ignore the reality of it, but that’s simply not the case. AI systems are getting filled with essentially all of human knowledge and they can remix it freely to create something new. This is the kind of stuff AI can produce just by itself, within seconds, the idea is from AI and so is the actual image. Sentience is not necessary for creativity.

It’s not AI that is steamrolling artists, it’s companies seeking to replace artists with AIs trained on their works that are threatening them.

When the artists are that easy to replace, their work can’t have been all that meaningful to begin with.