Can't speak for him, but I would guess that the answer is most working artists pay the rent churning out a stream of unfulfilling, uncreative, derivative works

Can't speak for him, but I would guess that the answer is most working artists pay the rent churning out a stream of unfulfilling, uncreative, derivative works (so they can buy themselves time to do actual artist things) requested by the sort of customer who has no idea what their real motivations are for requesting an artist who can create, when what they actually want, is a craftsman who can make. Most buyers of "creative work" are perfectly happy to pay a premium for something that looks remarkably like something -else- that impressed them, even though this is orthogonal to the purpose of working with an artist. I don't blame (actual) creative artists for dumping this craftwork drudgery onto AI, but it's hard to say what long-term consequences of tapping an ever-dwindling reserve of unexploited prior creative art will be. Maybe the world will end up like one of these ancient cultures whose creative inventory crystallized a century or two into their development and remained the same for the next 500 years until they collapsed.