[lucubratory]

Being a painter, a photographer, a musician, an actor, a freelance artist in any medium, has never been a viable career for any significant fraction of the people that want to do so. It has always been a hobby that some very small percentage of people manage to make enough money from to scrape by, and some infinitesimal percentage make enough money from to be wealthy. AI is unlikely to change that, because there will very likely still be a demand for celebrities that some infinitesimal proportion of lucky aspirants will fill, and the vast majority of the industry by numbers will be hobbyist or hobbyists-in-denial who think their small business drawing commissions for some normies & wealthy furries on Twitter will be an economically sustainable career for all the people that want to do it. The most likely outcome of AI in the long run is that a lot of these people produce significantly more work of equivalent quality without being paid any more because demand won't rise (there is already massive oversupply of art, demand is the limiter for financial feasibility), a lot more hobbyists are making art because of the lower barrier to entry, and animators + VFX artists have their productivity go up by a lot and can maybe trade that into real gains in conditions if they're willing to unionise.