Glancing at his work, very little of the AI generated using his name as a prompt really looks like his work. His name is a stand-in for "quality" rather than just style, at least in Stable Diffusion.

Eventually AI will eclipse us all, but professional illustration or concept artist is already a niche job. Companies that do concept art at scale already use all sorts of kit-bashing shortcuts to produce work at volume and scale to meet content demands and timetables.

People will still learn to paint with physical materials and digitally, partly because in order to hone AI work will likely need those skills to effectively work with and refine AI product. But also because people still do calligraphy.

Heck, people are still blacksmithing by hand. The market will change but trying to ban AI learning algorithms from using a basic google image search for reference (which is what these data sets are), is like arguing humans should have chips in their head preventing them from learning or imitating another style.

That mentality is already impacting creative pursuits (including software and music), we don't need to perpetuate it IMO by banning AI from learning from pre-existing material. Copyrighting styles as opposed to individual works is absurd.

The way I look at it, we often are willing to assign authorship to a director of a film, even though many many individual people work on it. The degree depends on the director, but essentially they are still outsourcing and then selecting material developed by other intelligences. The same thing with fashion designers or musicians/performers who bring in producers, etc.

The AI revolution will be similar. Just more people will be in the director chair.