I see it playing out this way too. Technology at societal scale is "and" not "or", and computers have long been cast in the scapegoat role because of a basic pr

I see it playing out this way too. Technology at societal scale is "and" not "or", and computers have long been cast in the scapegoat role because of a basic principle that is not unique to them, but is made all the more clear by their existence: it's easy to get wrong answers infinitely fast. When sampled digital audio first appeared in music, it went from experimental to pop hook(e.g. Paul Hardcastle "Nineteen") and then to the subject of court cases that clarified IP law for samples over the span of maybe 20 years. In the middle of that period one can find scare pieces about pit orchestras being replaced by synthesizers and so forth. The articles tend to be correct in that the same jobs don't exist when they get automated, but you get new jobs instead. And so the panic, where it exists, is tied to whether you specifically are on the chopping block. For digital illustrators who are focused on a high degree of finish and polish, AI art threatens because it's so good at replication of a high-effort stylistic mode of production. Cartoonists are much less impressed since they are already in a streamlined, symbolic mode, so the net savings of AI is harder to come by. With a few years of traditional training, most of it just focused on the core "you can draw what you see" skill, you have what you need to build up a library of reusable visual language for your work: an arm seen from various angles is still an arm, you can add more anatomy to it or stylize it, but it has a symbolic function tied to particular shapes. And an AI can bring out more detail from the symbol, just as when an artist follows a reference more closely and renders it more carefully, but it isn't creating novel representation. That's still coming from the illustrator operating symbolically. And when you lean into that, it's like, OK: presumably the AI will be able to do some style transfer and turn a crude cartoon into a fancy painting. That levels the playing field a lot but it doesn't change the nature of what makes an illustration good: having a sense of composition, storytelling and so forth. A lot of cultural context things are in there that will evade automation.