Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style.

Not at all. I'm no great artist but I did about 440 episodes of a webcomic some years ago. That's hundreds of times what I'd need to train an AI on that style. Now consider if I'd made that, trained the AI, and then DID NOT SHARE IT. Suddenly, I've got an AI thing that other people don't have (not directly, they can eventually have a second-order knockoff of it) made to express an intention that knockoffs won't have. So I'd have both the story to tell (hence the original training set) and the means to automate the creation of it. You've already got artists/technicians making things like Clip Studio brushes, things that transform a stroke into a very different style or dump scatterings of clip art for texture. This is literally the same thing only way more sophisticated. Just because you have a 'foliage brush' doesn't mean you can draw a woodland scene, it just makes the texture rendering trivial. Just because you can type 'woodland scene' doesn't make it a SCENE, it just makes the image rendering trivial. Does it serve a story purpose? What does the imagery do, beyond just existing? The mere existence of 'imagery in X style' is rapidly going to become really boring. Once 'an image can look like anything at all' becomes commonplace, to be impressed by that will be about as sophisticated as being impressed that plastic is shiny. It becomes all about 'what did you do with it?' and that is where artists come in.