Comment by imtringued

Why am I getting the impression that it's your ego that got hurt?

If you like art, then you don't necessarily care about the process, you just want it to keep being produced. Artists obviously want to engage in their profession, because they have the passion to pursue the creation of art. Said passion is now twisted into gatekeeping.

When you take a look around the internet, you can see an incredible amount of beautiful art being made through manual processes by artists and they voluntarily publish a lot of their work for free. The cost and personal enrichment argument is pretty weak here. If anything, the causality could even go in the opposite direction: Artists might want to earn money to pursue their passion.

Let's be honest for a second here. It's legitimate to feel that human created art is expensive and cost prohibitive for your particular needs. Art for professional or personal purposes is usually commissioned, aka made to order, hence it cannot be a mass market commodity.

These manual processes are also inherently limited due to the fact that the entire scene (character, outfit, pose, lighting, perspective) is baked in. If there is a process that doesn't have this limitation that's great, but if the lifting of limitations in one area isn't enough to counteract the loss in quality in other areas that the manual process didn't use to run into? Suddenly that is gate keeping even though the issue at hand is that the quality isn't good enough yet?

There's also an obvious parallel to frameworks and libraries in software development. If the software ecosystem lacks flexibility and customizability or has the wrong abstraction for the problem at hand, you will need to drop down a layer and do things the old fashioned way. A manual artist can produce a character template, a set of clothes or a background design from scratch and combine it with the higher level tools. An AI-only artist is inherently limited in that regard and yet that's supposed to be the future?