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I've wondered about the reception of AI art compared to hip hop in the 80s. Similar claims were made then, about plagiarism, the dilution of musical art, electronic instruments merely aping the real thing etc. I think what's different this time, or why the democratization idea doesn't go far, is because AI is a development given to us by a small number of wealthy nerds, and deeply corporate. Hip hop was DIY, and welled up from poor neighborhoods populated by people who are considered the antithesis of nerds.
I think the key point is that AI art is hitting the business of relatively low-skill commission artists.
I'm active in TTRPG subreddits and periodically see people post commissions of their characters: sometimes they have some neat stuff going on but the artistic merit is almost always lacking (the first result I found was this), and slapping a vague description into an image generator is going to produce something way more impressive pretty much every time. Yeah it might not hit the exact note you were looking for, but that's true of commissions too, and you can't tell the artist to go back and try again for free.
Porn is another example where the bottom's getting cut off: AI struggles with details and you have to use weaker models to generate any sort of adult stuff, but the bottom end is really bad, and you get to customize it as much as you want and churn out as many attempts as you want for free on a local model.
These people are often trying to do this as their job, which means their workday involves sitting around and posting on the Internet a lot, and they're often doing that for hobbies too. They also saw AI coming before most people did, because the early adopters playing around with Stable Diffusion would have been visible in their corners of the Internet. So they're initially the only ones who care about it, and being extremely online (and as artists, overwhelmingly left-wing) they know how to leverage progressive terminology to make their points. By the time it propagates out to the normies, the claim's been staked.
I have an online friend who briefly became 'the guy' for a fetish in the furry community since he started as just kinda doing very-vanilla art, then one time included something that wasn't the fetish he became known for but was like adjacent enough that his DMs started getting filled with people looking for that kinda content. Then, despite not particularly liking the fetish in question, he eventually folded after somebody offered him about 5x his going rate for something low-key in that space.
6 months later he's making like a good middle-class professional income for his developing country essentially being a fulltime fetish artist since it had kinda snowballed from there. And like his art skills are fine but we're not exactly talking a Renaissance Master. I haven't asked him, but I'd be shocked if the rise of AI hadn't absolutely nuked that line of art production even if some purists complain since you can knock together SOMETHING a lot quicker/cheaper, and AI has a lot more patience for infinite re-do requests than a human artist with limited time. Porn's also just uniquely suited to be hit by AI since it's either 'vanilla stuff tends to be super formulaic and there is an infinite sample basis' or 'more exotic stuff having an AI you can endlessly dictate your very particular desires to is more practical than having an artslave'
I'd be a little interested to know what the current situation is, for your friend. From what I've seen, the overall velocity and pay structure is still looking pretty healthy, with maybe some minor impact that could be holistic economic trends. Admittedly, most of the public data is about the Big Name Popufurs, and imprecise at that, so info from the selling side of the market would say more.
Some of that missing update is because almost all of the 'legitimate' sites ban the stuff and furry is a social environment as much as just a plain kink, but there are Discords and boorus where it's allowed, and it's not too hard to spin up alternative hosts... and those haven't been that badly flooded, either. E621 average around 900 posts per day, to E6AI's 120ish, for example, and that's with a lot of mainstay kinks getting very little focus.
I think part of it's the difficulty of the tools, and another are limits of AI-generator user creativity. You can prompt a ten thousand images overnight of <your favorite artist> doing <your favorite kink> with <your favorite species>, even if the artist doesn't even draw your preferred kink or even sexual orientation. AIgen's definitely beaten prima's test for simple sex in almost any gender combination and hole, and it only takes a little bit of work to get into threesomes or foursomes. But like my experiment three years ago with buff werewolf dudes, the fifth gigabyte doesn't have anything the first four didn't.
There are ways to get novelty or at least 'surprise' out of these tools, but it takes enough effort that most people would probably rather see their own ideas instead. To do that, though, you need to seriously think about what makes those ideas good, or work, and artists have a significant advantage actually breaking things into their components and drives. Even if it's just how poles go into holes.
I believe his stuff's slowed down a bit in recent years due to a combination of some other big artists popping up in the same fetish-scene and him taking a few hiatuses. Still got a backlog of commissions, but it's not what it was relative to the 2020-21 kinda peak (which goes for most digital jobs, realistically)
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