[cdrini]

I think you might be missing my point. It seems like you're arguing "being an artist is not becoming obsolete because...". I'm saying that OP is not making the claim that artist's are becoming obsolete. The OP's artist friends are making that claim. Not OP. So the frustration here is a little confusing to me.

But to address your claim, I disagree that the entire purpose of art is individualistic honing of craft. That's a very romantic view of art which I imagine many artists would also disagree with. There are many reasons why people create art. One is for the individual honing of craft. One is as a means to communicate. One is as a means of making a living. One is catharsis. Another is to bring about change. And there are many more. Most artists likely have a cocktail of these reasons as to why they are artists. My guess is professional artists _do_ want their art to pay the bills, and might not be able to practice their art if they had to spend 40h a week doing something else to pay their bills. So I understand their concerns that being a _professional_ artist _who can support themselves from their art_ might be becoming obsolete.

I do agree with you that I don't fully understand the purpose of OP's proposal to teach them the internals of how AI models work. I would understand teaching them AI artist tools like Adobe's AI integrations -- since these tools could potentially give them a competitive edge over other artists, which would help them be able to continue working in the field they love. And like you said, artists might not have a great love for the more corporate gigs that pay the bills -- where that individualistic expression is greatly diminished anyways -- so that might be a prime opportunity where an artist could use AI to help support themselves so that they can then spend time creating art they care about.