Mass-produced products exist in almost every physical product category I can think of: Chairs, tables, mobile phones, clothing, food and others. We know the trade-offs we make when we purchase a mass-produced product over something custom or artisan-made. With mass-produced products, we typically save money, the quality isn’t as good as something hand-made, but it satisfies a need.
Sometimes, we decide to invest in something that isn’t mass produced – a custom-designed bookshelf, a set of handmade dinnerware; this also has a trade-off. We know we pay more but the quality is better, it’s likely to last longer, and be more suitable to a specific need or needs. We may even save money in the long run.
It seems to me that large language models in their current form now enable us to mass produce words and images and it seems that, on the most part, it will be fine for most people. And yet, there are people who know and understand the value of something more hand-made and who value it enough to pay for it because we’re already doing that in every other product category that exists. Why would illustration be the abberation?