I've thought about this a lot, and the framing of the whole conversation feels off to me. When it comes down to it, I keep noticing two camps.
One group talks about visual output as communication or support. The other talks about the visual process as the work itself.
For the first group, visual art is instrumental. AI just made the instrument more available to people beyond those who can create the image themselves or afford to commission it. The image is functional. It is a means to an end.
Visual artists who resist AI often frame their relationship to art around the process: the resistance, the craft, the translation from mind to hand to image, and all that. Or at least, that is what's claimed, though we'll come back to that.
Either way, the two sides are usually not talking about the same thing, and they do not really care about what the other side values.
For the output/communication camp, AI is a sufficient tool, so they use it. End of story. The value was always in what got communicated, not how the image was made.
For the process camp, though, here is the thing: if you value the process, and that is what you are truly about, then AI cannot threaten that. It cannot automate someone else's experience of making something. It cannot take away the act of drawing, painting, designing, studying, struggling, improving, or translating an idea through your own hand.
The threat is only real if you were secretly measuring yourself by the output, which means this was partly about status, or by the exclusivity and scarcity of the skill, which means this was more about economics.
With the latter, the argument seems less about any “soul of art” thing and more about status and exclusivity. The pro-AI camp has no real reason to care about preserving that scarcity, as they have no incentive to protect a gatekeeping structure that mostly existed because visual production was expensive, difficult, or inaccessible.
Which is why the more prestige-driven anti-AI types have to switch to coercive tactics. They cannot persuade the output camp by appealing to process, because the output camp was never primarily invested in process. So the only move left is to try to shame, ban, blacklist, restrict, or socially punish the use of the tool. Which... will just end up pushing more away from their cause and turn it more and more into an echo chamber over time.
So yeah... I'm just thinking this is what's going on with things and why the whole debate is pointless.