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I for one do have sympathy for the artists.
Traditionally, automation improved job quality. Plowing the fields manually is back-breaking work, steering a farm tractor is a huge improvement over it. Likewise, multiplying numbers all day long was probably considered soul-crushingly boring by most of the human computers, and they would rather have a job dealing with fucking Microsoft Excel.
The obvious bottom job to automate would be the workers at Amazon warehouses. Sure, some would be upset until they found other work, but nobody would claim automation stole my dream job of fulfilling customer orders while peeing into bottles.
However, creative pursuits are actually the least intrinsically soul-crushing work there actually is. I imagine that there is competition between artists -- likely not everyone who would prefer to make a living drawing furry porn can earn enough, just like there is competition in pro sports, with a lot more people interested than the field can support.
Competition from AI art is a bit like allowing motorbikes in long-distance running. Suddenly you are not competing against your fellow humans any more. We are not yet in the stage where any kid could just spend 5k$ on a used bike and trivially win against the best human runner in the world for art, but this is clearly the way things are going.
Now, that would suck a bit if we were actually in a post-employment UBI stage where the artists would be free to spend their lives to make retro human-created art as a hobby, just as they might become chess grandmasters despite any kid with a mobile being technically able to defeat them. But we are not in that stage. Instead, we tell them 'why don't you work in an Amazon warehouse as a day job and make your now non-competitive art in your spare time?'
Yeah that's the main issue. First that there's no guarantee we have this sort of futuristic utopia where work doesn't exist (because it's all done by the robots) and we just pursue pleasure and "greater meaning" in our lives instead of a hell scape where most humans are deemed undesired by the AI overlord in charge of Claude Control Killbots, but also the transition period between now and then is going to be hella rocky and people will be hurt.
But this does happen, to a lesser degree, about other forms of work already. The solution the US seems to have is disability. We had a surge of disability applications during the long period of unemployment of the great recession for instance. We say "on you're too old to meaningfully adapt and find another job anymore, so we're essentially just gonna give you this as early retirement". One of the ways you can tell we do it as early retirement too is that the disability crisis we had in the early 2010s disappeared in the late 2010s/early 2020s, they all transitioned into normal retirement.
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