“Now” is the time? For fuck’s sake it has always been the time. Smaller artists have always lived and died by the donation.
If you’re approaching this from thinking AI is the problem: it has the potential to put the menial grunt labor of production art out of work. A lot of low level employees grinding backgrounds to earn resume points will have a hard time.
But moreso: it can put a wage earning artist in a position of art director for their own productions. Albeit currently said artist would need a specialized skillset of working with AI image generation. And not everyone wants to be a mini art editor or art director. It does have real threatening consequences for an industry.
Nonetheless the definition of what it means to be an artist is a fluid and dynamic concept. Maybe portfolios for art school won’t be a selection of painted works on canvas and instead an individually developed and trained checkpoint model for AI generation.