even mediocre artists actually create art, which is something stable diffusion can't do and will never be able to do. You completely misunderstand what art is and its purpose. It's not just a nice looking picture or a meandering story. You understand art as a technical profession creating a product to sell, which is why you equate AI slop with art. Your earlier comment making a distinction between artists and "ordinary people" is completely wrong. The distinction between someone who's an artist and otherwise isn't technical proficiency or ability to make a picture. It's a deeper skill than that, the ability to be creative, to have perspective. It's an ability to communicate. AI can't communicate because it doesn't have a perspective, since it doesn't actually know anything.

genuinely curious what you mean by 'mediocre artists' and the idea that Stable Diffusion has 'surpassed' them

do you have any examples? or is this just a vibes thing?

How will AI take over creative professions when it can't even perform rote professions? AI chatbots keep going rogue and lying to customers about company policies (and even the actual law), image generators can't get enough of illegal and violent imagery, facial recognition AI's keep identifying black people as all looking the same - in art the value of a peice is constrained by the meaning it has to people, so why do you think that LLMs and all the other predictive generators we laughably call intelligent will be able to create meaningful peices by putting together the most likely set of pixels?

the middle men

Describing normal working artists this way is weird as fuck, you have such a warped conception of reality