The effect of technological innovations is always that things get cheaper and thus available to more people and often that leads to bigger changes. In this case

The effect of technological innovations is always that things get cheaper and thus available to more people and often that leads to bigger changes. In this case I think you're right about this having a big impact on design; most designers won't lose their jobs but they will have new creative tools and I think they may start to use AI generated art in place of stock photograph. The average joe will be able to create stock photos for their blog posts and websites and maybe that will take away some amount of jobs, but those were probably not very good jobs anyway. Stylization using image to image techniques and inpainting are all tools that could save artists and designers time while also offering new capabilities. The AI tools definitely make it possible for a non artist to make a comic, illustrate a poem or an album cover, or make art for an indie video game. So in those ways more people will get access to things that they might not have before. I think the next wave will probably be video related AI tools and those will also be really impactful. At present it still takes a lot of trial and error to create what you want, something that a knowledgeable designer can probably do better than the average person, so I still see a need for design people in the loop in most cases. I can definitely see people starting to use AI tools for memes - it will be interesting to see if that is as sticky as memes are today. I think a lot of their value comes from recognizable formats, but AI art could definitely provide some interesting variety and new forms of expression. Fakes and misinformation is still a threat. We have yet to have a big event triggered by a fake AI generated image, but I think that day is coming. One thing about AI generated art - while you can make some crazy and interesting combinations (something that is fertile ground for artistic experimentation), the AI models can only ever interpolate _existing_ artwork. They can never come up with a new style or something that nobody has ever done before. One could argue that all art evolves from past art, but I think if we only ever used AI tools then creativity would eventually stagnate as the tools could only ever regurgitate a variation on something that has already been done.